Hundreds of people marched from Pershing Square to City Hall on Saturday, some with masks, some with bandanas, and many with signs bearing slogans admonishing the government, corporations and the current financial climate.

“We are the 99%”
“It’s not a crisis it’s a scam”
“Audit the Fed”
“Rights for the people not for corporations”
“200k in grad school debt where is my bailout?”

The protesters have been camped out on the City Hall lawn since Saturday, in solidarity with the 3-week strong Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. If America is a democracy, why does 1 percent of the population control 40 percent of the wealth, and take 25 percent of the income, economist and Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz asked in the May 2011 issue of Vanity Fair.

By mid-September, a few dozen representatives of the 99 percent mobilized and began an occupation of Liberty Park near Wall Street. The protests doubled and tripled in size, topping the news last Saturday night with some 700 arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Saturday, October 1 was also Day 1 for Occupy LA and in dozens of other cities including Boston and Chicago, the peaceful, anti-establishment protests spread in a manner inspired by the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring. With City Hall Park filled with people of all ages and ethnicities in circles of political conversation, megaphone-led chanting, drums and hacky sacks anyone napping under the numbered trees might have thought they woke up in the ’70s.

The L.A. contingency is relatively well organized, having met with City Hall officials and communicated with LAPD in advance of the Saturday march, training dozens of volunteer security to keep protesters on the sidewalk, hosting workshops on how to engage with civic leaders on City Hall’s north lawn, and coordinating with unions and progressive leaders. A nightly general assembly (GA) can go as long as three hours as established protesers and newcomers alike consider and vote on policies and tactics by consensus. The few dozen tents on City Hall’s south lawn shifted back to the north lawn when requested and the entire operation moves to the sidewalks from 10:30 p.m. to 6 a.m. per LAPD orders.

On Monday, when a hundred or so marched around the financial district, making stops to protest outside Mellon and Chase Banks, two squad cars followed in tow, protecting the protesters from rush hour traffic. The officers had a begrudged look on their faces but they were doing the jobs.

“It’s been a very peaceful demonstration,” Los Angeles Police Department Sgt. Mitzi Fierro told the LA Times Sunday. “They’re out there exercising their First Amendment right, so we’re going to allow them to continue as long it doesn’t become an unlawful assembly.”

“The Police are Part of the 99%” read another sign at the rally Saturday. Even Warren Buffet agrees that the rich don’t pay enough in taxes and with the economy still reeling after the taxpayer-funded $400 billion bailout of the financial industry and automakers, perhaps something’s got to give.

So far, there have been no arrests related to Occupy LA, however, the “love” expressed for LAPD in the chat room on the Occupy Los Angeles livestream is often tempered with caution. In New York, JPMorgan Chase recently donated a record $4.6 million to NYPD, leading many Occupy Wall Street protesters to cry that the police are owned by the banksters. And if that’s how the system works well the protests have only just begun.

Early cries of a corporate media blackout of Occupy Wall Street were all-but corroborated by NPR, whose Executive editor for news Dick Meyer was quoted in a September 26 blog post from ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos as saying, “The recent protests on Wall Street did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective.”

In hindsight, Meyer clearly missed the point. “What impresses me about media coverage of #occupywallstreet is how inattentive it is to a sleeping factor: the social media ignition moment,” NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen tweeted on September 27, referring to the exponential swelling of movements made possible by sharing across online networks.

Lack of media coverage hasn’t been an issue in Los Angeles, and certainly not since the 700 arrests in New York. The movement has issued a lengthy declaration and list of demands. But it seems as though there isn’t a clear endgame. Occupy Wall Street leverages the networked culture of the internet era, as Rosen alluded to, in hopes of expanding the conversation beyond right/left talking points and media quick hits. “It is difficult to comprehend a 21st century movement from the perspective of the 20th century politics, media, and economics in which we are still steeped,” wrote Douglas Rushkoff on Wednesday.

All is peaceful at City Hall. But today is just Day 5 of Occupy LA and a hundred or so protesters are expected to campout on the sidewalk again. As the Occupy Wall Street movement goes global how big will it grow? How much will the city and the police tolerate?

Photos via Andy Sternberg’s flickr set.

Facebook‘s biggest and boldest move to date was announced last week at its f8 conference. Timeline is a complete overhaul of Facebook profiles and changes the way user behavior is reflected and shared across one’s network, or social graph. In essence, Facebook expects users to be active participants in the social web, actively sharing thoughts, photos, and more but also sharing semi-passively. What you’re listening to, reading, discovering and discussing across many websites can now be automatically archived on one’s Facebook timeline and published in real time to the Facebook News Feed.

Facebook has always pushed openness and sharing on its users and this latest innovation is bound to spark concern among users who wish to maintain significant privacy controls over their profile and presence. For users that embrace the increasingly open and social nature of the web, the distracting nature of Facebook is about to multiply exponentially.

News Feed
In October 2009 Facebook made its first significant shift to a focus on the home page news feed. In October 2010 it discontinued apps and revealed a roadmap signaling intentions to bring everything into the news feed. By October 2011 this will be closer to a reality as the news feed will feature a firehose of activity featuring users’ friends and interests and their actions across not only Facebook but on other websites that incorporate Facebook’s Open Graph.

The ability to see not only the primary news feed, occupying the middle of the home page but also to see the “hyper” feed at top-right can be overwhelming. This is where lists come in handy, and fortunately Facebook has begun iterating “Smart Lists” including segmentation by city. So if you just want to see updates from friends in your city, that list is automated if you click on “more” next to lists for your Lists index and then click on the list name corresponding to your city to view updates from people in a 10-mile radius.

The news feed also adds an added layer of engagement — see what friends are doing on Facebook in real time and join in. This is an area that will grow rapidly now that Open Graph has been released in Beta. Many users find this hyper-news feed to be superfluous and annoying and there is at least one Chrome browser plugin available to make it go away.

For now you can view what friends are listening to in real time by visiting http://www.facebook.com/?sk=music and interact, comment and even listen with your own Spotify, Mog, or Rdio account (or check out Earbits). In fact, Spotify is so deeply married to its open relationship with Facebook that it now requires all users to have a Facebook login.

Open Graph

This makes the Facebook Connect experience more complex and potentially more rewarding but also potentially embarrassing depending on what content you are reading. Visit this page to see Facebook’s initial partners announced at the Open Graph beta launch at f8, which in addition to the music partners include The Guardian, Washington Post and Hulu. Open Graph is in Beta and your mileage may vary, in fact, many of the supposed launch partners don’t appear to have any live integration at the moment while others lead to broken 404 pages.

By September 30th the new-look Facebook Timeline will be live for all users according to Facebook. No matter your level of Facebook engagement, interest, or concern regarding privacy, your experience and most notably the appearance of your profile will change. Those interested in implementing Facebook Timeline early can do so by clicking “Sign Me Up” at the bottom of facebook.com/timeline.

The greatest hits of everything that Facebook knows about you will be visible on your profile, in reverse chronological order. This immediately flips some simple privacy features that you may already have in place:

• Your age: Even if your profile is set to only show the month and day (and not year) of your birth it will appear on your timeline. It may even appear to date you as older than you are (for me it says 2000s, 1970s, Born; I was born in 1975). More on this here.
• Embarrassing photos: Timeline will pick and choose your greatest hits as it wishes, unless you go through and mark various updates and photos to feature in your timeline.
• Past lives: Your past jobs, relationships, hobbies, etc will all be easy to access if they are made public. Who you married, who you broke up with, what jobs you started and ended. None of this needs to be points for concern, I think it’s better that we become a more open and less bashful society, however, you may want to take a quick look in case there’s anything out of context to cherry pick.
• You can add a featured header image: I added a photo I took during a drive in Bariloche, Argentina. Amusingly, the first audible reaction beyond oohs and ahs that I got when I showed Facebook Timeline to my class last Friday was: “hello, MySpace!” I had a similar first reaction to the wider, two-column look and feel of the timeline.
• Your information: Be careful with passwords and “secrets” for all of your online accounts. If somebody really wants access they might be able to easily find your Mother’s Maiden name or date of birth right there in your Facebook Timeline.

You may or may not agree that Facebook is onto something incredible here. But if you are not already affected by the new features and the Nicholas Felton-esque Timeline design or people complaining about them) you soon will be.

Watch the archived video of the entire Facebook f8 keynote below:

Facebook Timeline, announced this week at f8, Facebook’s Developer conference, revolutionizes the Facebook profile as we know it, unfortunately at the expense of some pre-existing privacy settings and expectations. Timeline is expected to replace all user profiles by September 30th (you can opt in early at the bottom of this page).

All users’ birth dates appear on a user’s Timeline regardless of settings. Even if you choose to disclose only the month and day of your birth (and not the year), your age can still be approximated as a result of its appearance in the context of the Timeline.

I do not feel this is a betrayal of privacy but I am flagging it as it seems to be bug in the way Timeline works and that it may lead to the revelation of similar issues in the way we record our history and behavior on Facebook and across the social web. The fact that Timeline reveals your birth year should be among the least of your concerns [see my more in-depth post here]. (Another borderline-irrelevant privacy expectation that changes in Timeline is one’s ability to see which friends added in particular years are no longer friends.)

Facebook Timeline is an incredibly cool concept and a very sharp way to archive, scrapbook and view all the important events in one’s life. I’ve decided to go ahead and make public my year of birth, however, there does not seem to be a resolution for people concerned with age discrimination and those who wish to remain ageless.

Today LinkedIn pulled a Facebook.

LinkedIn launched its own social ad network, which utilized users images and profile information in advertisements that would be served on the site, presumably to their contacts. LinkedIn really should have seen this coming — a few years back when Facebook did the same thing it experienced a user backlash.

What’s the fuss? Social network users expect the opportunity to select whether their likeness is used for profit. In both Facebook and LinkedIn’s case, users were initially opted in to the ad programs by default.

Now LinkedIn has stepped back just as Facebook did, claiming in an “I’m sorry but we told you so” blog post that the user trust was of utmost importance:

In early June, we announced changes to our privacy policy — including the new ad format’s opt-out policy — ahead of the first small test of these social ads. I also reiterated the same during the launch of social ads, explaining how members could opt-out of sharing their recommendations with their network.

The problem? Had LinkedIn taken a passive approach and introduced the social ad platform by spelling out an easy way for users to opt in to appearing in such ads — even perhaps offering incentive — it would have been fine. But automatically signing users up to appear in ads can be seen as exploitative and aggressive. Having corrected itself by pulling back on using user info and images, LinkedIn might wish to make amends by offering incentives to encourage users to participate in the social ads.

Facebook, by example of its incredible success, is not a normal company and likewise neither is LinkedIn. Both have found great success not without making relatively big mistakes. In March 2006, Mark Zuckerberg turned down a $750 million offer for Facebook insisting the upstart social network was worth $2 billion. In the first half of 2011 alone, Facebook’s valuation has been estimated at $50 billion to $100 billion.

But I digress. No matter what nonsense social networks put in their terms of service, the user will always prevail when it comes to a base level of privacy settings. These networks may be free but only at the price that the services take advantage of and in many cases sell its users. Once opted in to the network (by simply agreeing to the Terms of Service) the rules are always liable to change, most often in the interest of shareholders, and in the case of LinkedIn, with its stock still soaring at nearly 50 percent above its price when it hit the open market 3 months ago, keep an eye out for more creative maneuvers to capitalize on its 120 million user profiles.

There are consumer protections against such behavior, though not so much in America. But LinkedIn’s move this morning may have violated European law.

Photo by alancleaver_2000 used under Creative Commons license.

Specific Media will acquire the fledgling social network turned social entertainment site for $35 million according to All Things D.

“Today, we are announcing that Myspace will be acquired by Specific Media, one of the world’s leading online media and advertising platforms,” Jones wrote in the email addressed to Myspacers. “Over the next few days you will be hearing from the team at Specific, including their CEO, Tim Vanderhook, regarding their exciting plans for Myspace and how it fits in with the overall vision of their company.”

Jones indicated in the email that a significant reduction in staff was imminent, adding that he would be stepping down as CEO of Myspace after assisting with the transition to Specific Media over the next two months.

$35 million seems like quite a bargain for Myspace, which was founded in 2003 and acquired two years later by Fox Interactive Media (part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.) for $580 million. If nothing else, Specific media comes away with 8 years of data encompassing the demographics and behavior of millions of users.

Since 2009 Myspace has laid off approximately 1,500 employees. The dilution of up to half of the remaining 400 employees, most based at Myspace’s Beverly Hills HQ, began Wednesday.

Several close friends of mine worked at Myspace in its final iteration, some of whom are featured in the Blogroll at right (Sean Percival, Mike Macadaan, Tony Adam). Percival, VP Online Marketing, tweeted earlier today: “Today is my last day with Myspace. It was a unique moment in time and an impossible problem to solve. Was proud to be a part of it.” He later blogged of his imminent return to startup world, where no doubt he’ll continue to have great success and growth. SEO-meister Tony Adam blogged that he’ll be carrying on with his startup Visible Factors. Congrats all and best of luck on whatever’s next!

Personally, I’ve had a Myspace profile seemingly forever, having joined at some point in 2004, having sensed early tremors of the first tectonic shift in social networking — the great exodus from Friendster to MySpace. I never used it much socially, especially after the great fake pornorific inbox spammings of 2006… I had already begun using Facebook at the time, gaining early-ish entry while a grad student.

Companies across the tech landscape immediately began reaching out with job offers to Myspace engineers and developers about to enter the tech talent pool.

Myspace was the primary social network of choice for more than 100 million users and became a successful vehicle for the promotion and discovery of music artists. But in 2007 Facebook opened up to users outside of universities and soon eclipsed Myspace in popularity. By 2008 Myspace’s user base had stagnated while Facebook is now approaching 700 million users worldwide.

Irvine-based Specific Media is one of the largest entities on the internet and specializes in online advertising. According to the WSJ, the Myspace acquisition helps transition Specific “into a media company with its own ad space to sell instead of simply an online ad technology firm that brokers ad space on behalf of other websites.”

From the press release announcing the acquisition:

“Myspace is a recognized leader that has pioneered the social media space. The company has transformed the ways in which audiences discover, consume and engage with content online,” said Tim Vanderhook, Specific Media CEO. “There are many synergies between our companies as we are both focused on enhancing digital media experiences by fueling connections with relevance and interest. We look forward to combining our platforms to drive the next generation of digital innovation.”

Both Activision CEO Bobby Kotick and Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, two Myspace cofounders, were rumored to be interested in acquiring the company in recent days.

Parts of this post originally published at LAist.
Previous posts about Myspace:

• Show Me the $$$ – 3/28/2006
• Pew: 50 Million Create Own Web Content – 5/30/2006
• The Facebook Lesson – 9/7/2006
• Universal Threatens to Sue YouTube, MySpace – 9/15/2006
• Is MySpace the Teenage Parking Lot of Today? – 1/11/2007
• Facebook Profiles Go Public – 9/5/2007
• Socializing the Music Industry: Online Tools – 9/10/2008
• Privacy Concerns and Social Networks – 5/18/2010

With Twitter becoming more and more of an echo chamber and LinkedIn lacking in conversation what it offers as a networking tool, it can be difficult to find a place on the web to provoke frank conversation, receive honest feedback, and develop professional relationships for co-creation.

Namesake, a Los Angeles-based startup, is hoping to fill that void. Founded in January 2010 by entrepreneurs Brian Norgard and Dan Gould as a place for professionals and creators to match ideas with opportunities and resources, Namesake.com is still in private beta (to get in now http://nmsk.co/gRsIvp).

Based in a small office in the Hollywood Hills, Namesake is the third startup for Norgard and Gould, who previously cofounded NewRoo, a content aggregator acquired by News Corp in 2006, and Twitter advertising tool Ad.ly.

As a Namesake user, you can build a profile with a full bio and embedded video, or choose to keep it simple. Users can follow conversations passively, participate, and initiate their own. Conversation activity on the site streams in real time on the main page.

Questions and topics recently active in conversations on the site range from the Peter Thiel-inspired “What is it about the world that you know is true that everyone else doesn’t understand?” to “…here’s my washed, dried Beef round top round steak, what shall I do with it?” and “Anyone got tips for staying active in social media… while still being productive & getting tons of stuff done?”

Namesake also features live chats, one afternoon for example, author and USC Marshall faculty member Dave Logan is leading a conversation on tribal leadership. A live chat earlier that day featured LA-based serial angel investor and BetterWorks founder Paige Craig.

Try Namesake out for yourself — get in while it’s still in beta by visiting http://nmsk.co/gRsIvp.

Originally posted May 26, 2011 at LAist.

Last.fm, iLike, Networked Blogs, Causes and any of the hundreds of third-party apps you may have incorporated into your Facebook Profile page are no longer there. As I wrote about last month, Facebook’s customizable profile experiment was short-lived even if its demise took over a year.

Before this weekend, if you added approved third-party applications to your Facebook profile, many would have the option of adding to your wall or as a profile tab. The default selection would be to your Boxes tab. Today, even the Boxes tab is missing the apps that you used / played with / were annoyed by over the past couple years. From NY times Quiz, to How big of a Cubs fan are you?, To Myflickr, finetune, and everything else under the sun: Gone. Granted, the Boxes tab on my profile used to run on and on and pretty certain that nobody ever checked it out (myself included). Now the Boxes tab shows nothing more than I’m allowed to display on my profile tabs: the Facebook proprietary applications “Video” “Photos” and tabs for “Links” I share, “Notes” I write or import from this blog via RSS, Events, and Questions. The Boxes column is much narrower and ads have returned.

It’s been fun taking advantage of Facebook’s more open experiments over the past couple years but now our Facebook profiles have returned to their original states as rather vanilla bulletin boards.

That said, if I do want to customize my online profile and incorporate apps and even add raw html… there’s always Myspace!

Twitter’s “Who to Follow” personalized suggestions can now be seen in the right-hand sidebar of the Twitter.com user web app and under this tab. This is familiar territory to anyone who uses Facebook or even Amazon. Twitter knows who you follow and who follows you back as well as who many in your circle follow that you do not yet follow. Hence the social graph. It’s a wild and crazy algorithm, but if you think about it in physical terms, we all have friends that we want to introduce specifically to other friends. And it should be assumed that by using Twitter, you hope to communicate with and discover new peers, business partners, etc.

Why Do We Want the Social Web to Know Us?
Because this is what web 2.0 is all about. You can surf anonymously – using anything from Tor to the private browsing feature in Safari browsers. But for the fully-featured and most valuable web experience, it’s best to surf with an identity. This is why Google asks you to login when you search — it knows your history (assuming you have the feature enabled) and can personalize the search experience for you. This is why Facebook takes whatever info you enter into your profile and advertises accordingly. Are these businesses manipulating us? Absolutely not. You pay nothing for these services and in return they optimize the experience by delivering content that is relevant to you. And yet you can easily manipulate it for yourself. For example, I took “single” out of my Facebook profile months ago as I grew tired of endless ads for dating sites featuring strangely acronym-ed women who apparently are appropriate for my age. While this hasn’t led to any confusion (nobody’s asked why I’m not listed as “single”), nor has it led to any good fortune (I still am single). But I never have to look at those scary ads anymore.

Twitter isn’t as blatant with its advertising but the service has been criticized for it’s curated Suggested Users lists in the past. (I’ve documented my experience with this here). In this case — and it’s Twitter’s third attempt at a suggested follow device I believe — it is done right. There could be some more options for opting out but I look forward to seeing how this gets incorporated into the Twitter API and the hundreds of mobile, desktop, and web-based Twitter clients that each have their own features.

Old vs. New

The biggest difference is that the new feature is not curated (other than algorithmically) and — more importantly — it gives context as to why you might want to follow these users by listing friends of yours who already follow said user. One third-party app that I previously found to do this quite well is Refollow.com.

Now if only Twitter would help make it easier for me to follow so many damn awesome people without getting overwhelmed I might have some fun with this feature myself.

From the Twitter blog:

Today we’re beginning to roll out a simple, but powerful new feature to help address that — “Suggestions for You”. The algorithms in this feature, built by our user relevance team, suggest people you don’t currently follow that you may find interesting. The suggestions are based on several factors, including people you follow and the people they follow. You’ll see these suggestions on Twitter.com and the Find People section. If you like a suggestion, click “follow”; if you don’t, click “hide,” and we’ll try not to suggest that user again.

Ages after every other internet portal and social network went ahead and entrapped the unfocused masses in endless loops of Q and A clickery, your Facebook news feed is probably popping with sophomoric questions right about now.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun — as in funny. I can’t take it seriously. And I’m going to have to make sure this April Fools joke comes to an abrupt end (as soon as somebody tells me how to opt out). Did I think twice before trying out questions? Well, I took a second to take the above screenshot, but then I dived right in. I wanna play! This is the most fun and interactive FB App since Mafia Wars! Look at all those notifications — mostly from people I don’t even know… yet!

But I really felt like I was doing this while trying not to fall asleep in 4th grade Language Arts class or something. ESPECIALLY when Facebook told me that I had to capitalize the first word [sic] of each sentence.

My answer was so dumb it was removed or voted off. So I had to answer another one!

Nice to see Facebook finally reaching out to its under-served high school (and younger) community and to provide some educational value while at it!

So now that I wrote this tongue-in-cheek blog post about Facebook’s latest feature, can I quit it?

Not before I ask.

Check out real Facebook + Media coverage of Q&A here, here, here, and here. I’ll come back to FB Questions if the API proves to really open up the platform and say, enable embedding of questions and polls on this here blog.

MySpace served itself well by publishing the note MySpace Empowers Users With New, Simpler Privacy Setting in outlining the company’s ethos and it’s mission to enable both discovery and self-expression for users since its inception in 2003.

But MySpace’s memo falls short on definition and lacks any sort of road map (beyond “in the coming weeks…”) to give users the “we’re in this together” feeling that Facebook so often overlooks. And it’s more than 3 weeks after the Facebook open graph-api-privacy hubbub broke out. Facebook privacy concerns made headlines again on May 5 when a glitch that provided access to some users’ private information was uncovered (and allegedly patched within hours).

This tactic isn’t the result of a Friday “why not?” post on TechCrunch, it is just the kind of reactionary stage-stealing that any startup needs to capitalize on to rise to the top and evolve proactively. The fact that Facebook has broken out so far ahead of the pack over the past year makes it surprising that such reactions aren’t scripted months in advance. Twitter manages to evolve more subtly as it remains a relatively small and nimble, privately held company.

It’s been a long two years since Facebook leapfrogged MySpace in terms of unique visitors and never looked back. MySpace still boasts about 50 million monthly uniques — down from 100 million in 2008 — compared with 130 million for Facebook according to compete.com (March 2010). Exactly why MySpace should be capitalizing on any negative attention (whether deserved or not) that Facebook draws as often as possible. I’m specifically referring to the latest string of changes in the evolution of Facebook’s privacy settings, the opening of its social graph, and the way in which these changes have been poorly communicated to users. The first reaction to any change in policy or terms of service from Facebook has been one of general dismay followed by threats of ditching the service, and inevitably acceptance.

Facebook claims to have 400 million active users spending 500 billion hours per month on the service. Similar and competing companies such as MySpace should not hesitate to distinguish themselves from any criticism Facebook attracts (however warranted it may be). But the reality may be that MySpace and every other social network out there remains timid about privacy standards and user expectations and awareness.

The internet is still very much the wild west. And hackers will always be one step ahead of the law and security systems meant to stop them. As Bruce Schneier says, “You can’t defend. You can’t prevent. The only thing you can do is detect and respond.” It’s very cut-and-dry: post personal information to a free service such as Facebook or MySpace and assume that anyone would be able to find it. Though the internet often feels like a geek’s best friend, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not “all about you.”

What one publishes to the internet is out there – whether or not it works against them or to their advantage, or fades into the ether. But this is an opt-in society. It seems ludicrous and unnecessary to feature 50 privacy settings with 170 options as Facebook now does but it is important for users to seriously consider what they choose to share and with whom they choose to share specific types of content and data. It’s equally important for social networks to work with its core users, and to that end, we’ll see if Facebook takes a step back and refines the new settings.

But is MySpace referring to privacy settings or sharing options in offering a sort of one-click privacy function, with options including “public, friends only, or public to anyone 18 or over?”

Open systems have their pros and cons, but in the end — ideally — it all shakes out. The same can be expected of the OpenSocial platform, which MySpace endorses as a developer platform. New applications have been released in recent days such as SaveFace and ReclaimPrivacy that can restore user privacy settings in Facebook. It remains to be seen whether Facebook will act to ban such applications from the social network.

Facebook will inevitably face more negative publicity approaching the fall release of The Social Network, a major theatrical release which apparently portrays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a “ruthless and untrustworthy sex maniac.” Meanwhile MySpace is poised to make a splash with a new look rumored to debut later this year. If Jones and Co can parlay this privacy issue into some real momentum while Facebook leaves its users to figure everything out for themselves… you never know – but “simpler” isn’t always better.