Nokia, Finland’s largest company and the world’s number one mobile manufacturer by volume, is in trouble. Failure to adapt its smartphones has left the company languishing where it once dominated, as stylish computing corporations and search specialists now hold the top revenue spots.

Nokia’s second quarter financial results were horrifying to many, let alone those associated with the company. The Espoo-based mobile maker record a €487 million operating loss (a drop of €782 million in just one year), overall net sales plummeted 11% quarter-on-quarter and 7% year-on-year, as smartphone sales dropped 32% to 16.7 million units.

This drop ensured that as Nokia entered its third-quarter, the company lost its position as the global leader in smartphone sales to Apple (with iPhone sales reaching more than 20 million units), a position that it had held for 15 years.

Stephen Elop, Nokia’s CEO and the man tasked with leading the recovery of Finland’s biggest exponent, believes that despite huge losses and the concession of its smartphone sales lead, adopting Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform and “mitigating the impact” of challenges faced as a result of dropping the Symbian platform and cutting thousands of staff, will bring “long-term opportunities for Nokia”.

Basically, Elop says things may get worse before they get better.

Elop said that Nokia has already taken action to reduce the inventory build-up in its first quarter (possibly as a result of less-than-expected sales in those regions), amended its pricing structure worldwide (slashing prices on its online shop, for example) and has begun focusing its sales and marketing resources towards consumer retail interactions.

All of Nokia’s long-term plans hinge on the success of its new Windows Phone smartphones, devices that it hopes consumers – especially those in the US – will marvel at. Nokia has traditionally offered superior build quality, exceptional hardware and competitive pricing – but even this might not be enough to dig the company out of the hole it has created for itself.

Nokia needs to completely rebrand its range of handsets and reconfigure its marketing approaches to truly stand a chance of becoming relevant again. And here’s why.

Smartphone Rebranding

Nokia will always be known for its numerical device naming process, the company has spent decades labeling new devices with a single letter prefix and a random set of numbers (although more recently it has settled on adding just a single digit). The naming system worked when the company was updating its handsets at a furious pace but in the last six months alone, Nokia has launched five Symbian-powered handsets and one Meego device, with each handset appealing to a specific demographic.

Of Nokia’s latest N-series and X-Series smartphone, two are technically unsurpassed in the hardware department, one is business focused and the others are generally aimed at whoever will buy them.

When Nokia makes its Windows Phone smartphones available, rumours suggest the company will employ the “W” prefix and then name its devices similarly to its N-Series and X-Series phones released recently.

The problem with the a “W1″ or “W10″ device naming policy is that it harks back to the good old days of Nokia, names that do not send a “come and get me” beacon out to the general smartphone consumer when they are in the market for a new phone.

Nokia’s rivals utilise a select set of nouns with the sole intention making their devices memorable – Apple uses iPhone, HTC comes in with its Sensation, Thunderbolt, Evo (short for Evolution) and Hero devices, with Samsung pushing its Galaxy smartphones.

With a W1, or similar naming convention, Nokia isn’t inspiring the consumer, it is simply pushing new devices with familiar codenames. When HTC, Samsung, LG, Dell and a number of new OEMs are releasing “Pro”, “Trophy”, “Focus” and “Optimus”, smartphones running the same Windows Phone operating system, would a Nokia codename appeal over names chosen by its rivals?

Nokia Services

When Nokia announced it had dropped the Ovi brand, the mobile industry breathed a collective sigh of relief.

In 2007, Nokia launched a range of Internet services and apps under the Ovi brand, incorporating sharing tools, music downloads, maps and games under its umbrella. With application downloads in their infancy, Nokia launched the Ovi service two months after Apple’s iPhone, hoping to bring its devices on par with a new kind of mobile device that came with its own set of integrated services and launchable applications.

With Google bundling its own services on its Android platform, and Apple securing partnerships to keep Google Search and Maps available on the iPhone, Nokia’s Ovi service not only confused consumers as to whether it was actually a pure Nokia service but was also the only suite of vendor tools that was actually referred to by name.

In May, Nokia said it would slowly begin to wind down the Ovi brand and rebrand its services under the “Nokia” banner, a transition the Finnish giant expected to start in July and continue into 2012.

Nokia knew it had a problem and moved to rectify it. Jerri DeVard, the company’s EVP and Chief Marketing Officer, put it simply:

“We have made the decision to change our service branding from Ovi to Nokia. By centralizing our services identity under one brand, not two, we will reinforce the powerful master brand of Nokia and unify our brand architecture – while continuing to deliver compelling opportunities and experiences for partners and consumers alike.”

Moving forward, Nokia needs to understand that its potential customers are more than likely already enjoying devices powered by Apple’s iOS platform and Google’s Android operating system. This means that the company cannot simply enter the market with a like-for-like range of devices and similar platform, it needs to enter the market and drive home its own unique selling point.

When Nokia’s new devices launch, they will hit the market with Microsoft’s latest Windows Phone update, codenamed Mango. Mango builds on Microsoft’s solid foundations, removing many of the bugs and annoyances whilst adding some truly innovative features, particularly with new messaging, Xbox, Office and social integrations.

Nokia will be be able to bundle its own services to work alongside the new update, building upon Microsoft’s own mapping tools to give consumers unique reasons to buy a Nokia-specific Windows Phone smartphone. Nokia will also be able to leverage Microsoft’s connection to Windows desktops to tempt in users who need document and office synchronisation.

Marketing Push

Speak to someone who has an intimate knowledge of the mobile space and they will tell you that technically, a Nokia and Microsoft partnership should be successful. Windows Phone has received praise for its usability, aesthetics and integrated applications and services, whereas Nokia has been long regarded as one of the top handset makers in terms of hardware quality.

Releasing Windows Phone devices will not be enough for Nokia, it has to completely change the mindset of the consumer to believe the Finnish mobile giant is a force to be reckoned with again. That means a targeted marketing push and almost certainly an investment of millions of advertising dollars.

Android and Apple smartphones sales are largely driven by a younger demographic, with more than 40% of smartphone buyers between the ages of 18 and 34. However, around half of mobile phone owners are now over the age of 50, and account for only a small percentage of smartphone users.

If Nokia was to change its naming dynamic, it would be able to target devices at different demographics, marketing handsets to an older user-base. Windows Phone devices are easy to operate and are known for their ability to “just work”, removing the complexity that is commonly associated with Android.

Just because older mobile-phone users aren’t massive smartphone buyers, this doesn’t mean that adults won’t be impressed with what these new devices can do. The ability to chat on a social network will tempt a teenager or young adult but it will be largely ignored by an over-30 demographic. However, explain that there is an array of health applications, satellite navigation services and document collaboration features powering a Nokia handset (phones that older users will recognise and trust), and an often forgotten demographic could assist Nokia in its attempt to reverse sales numbers across Europe and North America.

Nokia may be able to sink millions into marketing, but without the support of the carriers, it may fall at the first hurdle. In the years where Nokia pushed Symbian, despite there being no real demand for the platform in popular markets, mobile operators lost interest and sometimes new smartphones would launch on just a single carrier in the US, giving Nokia no chance of actually establishing a moderate user-base in the country.

Stephen Elop said last week:

“Step by step, beginning this year, we plan to have a sequence of concentrated product launches in specific countries, systematically increasing the number of countries and launch partners.”

The company may have the tools, options, marketing expertise and revenue programs to appeal to the operators but its devices will ultimately dictate the companies’ fate. It already has relationships with 132 operators in the 190 countries it operates in but if its new smartphones are just more of the same, the company could find itself in the same position it is today a year down the line.

If Nokia can connect the pieces of the intricate puzzle it is trying to build, it will stand a chance at not only increasing its smartphone sales, but also encourage consumer confidence in the brand. With consumers confident that Nokia devices are reliable, powerful and come as part of a steady release cycle, developers will want to develop for the platform to capitalise on the demand for Windows Phone applications, fueled by Nokia’s emergence as a major Microsoft OEM.

To assist developers, Microsoft has already waived its registration fee, offered free developer tools and a complete developer portal with dedicated tools for helping developers maintain and analyse their apps.

Conclusion

Many of the points discussed in the article have been touched on by Elop, who has already said Nokia will use its established position within the industry to deliver top-end smartphones on a large scale. Nokia’s CEO admits we are just at the start of the “mobile revolution” and will utilise Microsoft’s position in the document publishing, gaming and Internet service markets to drive the company forward.

Nokia knows it must adapt its offering to stand out from its rivals, but keep its products and services familiar so that consumers aren’t embarking on a new learning curve if they buy a Nokia Windows Phone.

Elop hasn’t made the mistake of copying Apple and Google. He has detailed a unique path that will see his company’s efforts focused on what could be its last chance of staying relevant as a smartphone vendor. We are but months away from seeing what Nokia has planned for its new devices, only then can we truly see whether the Finnish mobile giant stands a chance at reversing its fortunes.

Christian Groß was given an assignment in class – to take existing data and use it to create a visual or audio representation, using the coding framework, Processing. That is how the SMS to Paper Airplanes project came to exist.

Groß tapped into his long distance relationship with his girlfriend, using the SMS messages that they sent back and forth from September 2010 to April 2011. The visual representation of the SMS message that Groß chose was the paper airplane.

Groß explains his choice on his blog, saying “The challenge was to find a medium, which is variable and able to visualize the information of the text messages, but at the same time allows to keep the content private. For me the paper airplane was the perfect image for this scenario, because the text messages as well as travelling by plane are the most common ways for us to cover the distance.”

Each paper airplane was created depending on certain criteria.

The size of the paper airplane was relative to the length of the message, while the number of folds was relative to the amount of positive emotional words in the message. The final placement of the paper airplanes depended on the time the message was sent and its emotional value.

The result was a whimsical display of 369 messages in the delicate form of paper airplanes.

As someone who switches between the hats of freelancer and small business owner several times a day, I’m always on the lookout for software that will help me manage things like invoicing and expense management, financial reporting, project management and team discussion.

It’s not hard to find apps that excel at one of these things. What is hard is finding an affordable solution that allows me to manage all of these aspects of my business from one place, making it easier for myself and my team to get the busywork and administrative stuff out of the way and back to the work of creating content.

Paymo is an app that covers time-tracking, invoicing and project management for freelancers and small businesses. It’s challenging incumbents like Freshbooks, with an offering that is not only cheaper but — in many areas — stronger.

Paymo is a bootstrapped startup with an app built by a small team in Romania. Though they’re talented, their country of origin can make it hard to get any real traction in the West. Eastern Europe has started to create some great tech startups of late. Paymo.biz, which isn’t to be confused with Paymo.com, owned by American mobile payments company BOKU, is one of these.

Making you wait until the end of a review as long as this one to find out whether the app is worthwhile or not seems a bit unfair on the reader, so here’s the bottom line on Paymo: this week, I’m transitioning my freelance business and my small agency to run on Paymo, leaving a random collection of tools such as FreshBooks, project management apps and emails that belong in project managers behind. Paymo has everything I need to run freelance and small businesses, and I can see it scaling to medium size with relative ease.

The Dashboard

Paymo’s dashboard provides you with an overview of how time is being spent in your business when you log in for the day. It’s got charts that show the hours worked per day for the last week, as well as statistics and charts on how much business time was spent on work versus, well, nothing — it can tell you this because users set the work days and work hours of each week, making Paymo a good tool for ensuring that employees are spending their time wisely. With Paymo, time tracking is as useful for billing clients as it is for ensuring your team has been working.

Also on the dashboard is a Recent Activity summary, which shows you recent milestones and tasks that have been completed. You can get RSS or iCal feeds for recent activity.

Client Management

Paymo’s client manager is robust enough that most freelancers and smaller businesses won’t require a separate, dedicated CRM platform. When creating a new client, there are fields for a whole range of information for both the company, and your contact at the company, including an area to make notes in. Paymo lets you add a logo for the client for quick identification.

The Clients tab shows you an overview of all of your clients, including how many staff are allocated to them, the number of active projects they are on, and how many completed and archived projects you’ve done for that client.

The view for individual clients shows the contact information as well as all other details and notes for the company as well as the contact details of the individual you designated as the contact there.

You’ll also find financial statistics, such as how many unbilled hours you’ve done for the client, how much money is due from that client and a handy meter at the bottom that shows you how much of the time budget for each of that client’s projects has been used — you can set a number of hours per month per client project and the time you track or enter for the project will fill up the bar. This is a great feature if you have clients on retainer for a set number of hours to prevent you from going over.

There’s a chart for financial statistics, but it seems that I need to populate the system with more information before anything will appear there.

Project Management

The Projects overview is a simple view that lists each active project, their corresponding parent clients, and the used budget meter makes a reappearance. Clicking through to a single project, the first thing you’ll see is the overview tab, which contains data about the amount of time spent on tasks that fall under the project, recent activity, time worked, unbilled hours, and access to settings — such as the hourly rate on that project. From this view you can subscribe to a project specific RSS or iCal feed, and retire or delete the project.

On the Tasks tab, you’re able to set up a variety of task lists, which contain the actual tasks. Tasks can have a description, marked up with Textile, a due date, and related attachments. You can assign each task to a user, and determine whether that task is billable or not in case you include administrative tasks that you don’t normally bill for in project task lists.

You can save task lists as templates, which is fantastic if you work in a field where projects often look the same, at least to begin with. You can comment on tasks and discuss them with other users.

Milestones are an important part of all project management apps, and Paymo doesn’t disappoint. You can add milestones with a due date and a person responsible for ensuring progress towards that milestone, and associate it with a task list. Once the items in that task list are complete, the milestone is deemed reached, but you can manually complete a milestone without a task list.

Paymo’s data storage comes into play on the project level. The second-last tab in the project view is the Files tab, where you can upload and categorize images, documents and other files that are relevant to the project. Any file you upload as an attachment to a task will appear here as well.

Last but certainly not least is the essential Discussion tab. This tab works like a forum, where discussions are sorted by category, though there are none by default. As with most larger text inputs in Paymo, discussion posts can be formatted using Textile. There is unfortunately no way to reference attachments or tasks in discussions yet but the discussion area isn’t weighed down by bloat, which is a problem I commonly have with forum software.

The Timer

Paymo has a browser-based timer that can be launched from within the web app or a bookmarklet, and will appear as a smaller pop-up window easily positioned to the side of whatever you’re working on. It’s a breeze to use: select a project, a task, and hit the Start button. You can optionally include notes about the time spent, which allows you to easily account for every slice of time you spent on a project.

While some time tracking applications only allow you to tie time slices to clients and projects, Paymo has task management features right there in the timer. You can add a new task to a project to start timing right there and then, and mark a task as complete as well. You can’t set up a project from within the timer but once that’s done you can manage everything in it.

Paymo offers a desktop widget for Windows and OS X that simplifies the process of time tracking. While it is great to have the ability to track time from unexpected locations, a widget is more easily accessible and is still there when the Internet goes down. All you need to do after installing the widget is throw an API key into it, which is conveniently provided on the widget download page, and log in to your account. The widget is laid out just like the online time tracker so there’s no confusion.

While I doubt you’d even notice the size of the widget on a computer with a more regularly sized computer, I’m testing this on an 11″ MacBook Air which leaves me wishing there was a thinner option. The widget takes up about a quarter of the dashboard — still manageable, but a way to choose between the default view and a compact view would be fantastic.

While the beauty of tools like Paymo is that you can use a timer to automatically log how much work you’ve done on a project, you can also manually enter time slices into the Timesheet after the fact. If you go out on an in-person call or to a meeting, it’s less practical to use a timer. Or you may have simply forgotten to hit Start but still need to get paid for the past five hours of work.

Time tracking is certainly Paymo’s strongest suit. In the past seven years I’ve searched long and hard for a great way to unobtrusively track time and I’ve always hated the solutions I’ve tested. Paymo does it for me.

Desktop App

In addition to the desktop widget for time tracking, there’s a more fully-featured desktop application available. It’s still in beta, and comes in Windows and, more recently, Mac flavors.

As beta apps, they’re early on and not fully developed, but are an interesting way to see not just how much time you’ve spent, but how you’ve spent it. The app keeps a record of how much time you spent in each app you used for the duration, and allows you to sort them by client and project later.

This is a really cool feature: if you’re tracking time for Client A, but Client B calls you on Skype midway through, you can easily bill the appropriate clients for each slice of time and you won’t lose any billable hours due to not having an accurate account of the interruption.

Invoicing

Paymo’s Invoicing feature set is easy-to-use and robust without the bloat. From the overview, you can view and set the statuses on invoices. These include draft, sent, viewed, paid and void. Paymo makes it easy to export invoice data as CSV so you can set up Excel spreadsheets of your monthly activity and the like.

The invoice creator is a WYSIWYG affair, and draws on your company settings to populate the invoice with some default information, before you come in and set the individual details such as the client and the hours logged in question. You don’t need to draw on your tracked time and can enter fixed figures instead (or in addition). Like most invoicing apps, you can set taxes that are automatically calculated, provide notes, and so on.

One of the great things about Paymo invoicing is the ease with which you can change the currency of an invoice without having to go and edit the client settings separately. For a freelancer or small business owner with a situation comparable to mine — accounts in a range of different countries, paid in a range of different currencies — this small detail saves time.

Most apps don’t have a feature for this, and some that do (like Freshbooks) make it the default for the client in the future instead of just that invoice, which isn’t what I want.

Adding time to an invoice is a breeze. Click on Add From Time Sheet, select a date range — there are commonly used presets, such as the previous month — and barring any need to change details, click Submit. If you’ve set up your clients, projects and company settings properly, and tracked time accurately, creating an invoice is a matter of a few seconds and a few clicks.

You can create a PDF file from that invoice or provide your client with a permalink that shows them the invoice in the browser (with the option to download it as a PDF or print it). The most common route is to use the Send button which will email it from within Paymo.

Paymo has recently introduced a beta “pay online” feature that allows clients to click a Pay Now button on the invoice page they are taken to and pay the invoice then and there through PayPal. Despite the beta label it works like a charm.

Creating recurring invoices is just as easy, and can be done from the Recurring tab of the Invoicing section, or just by ticking the Recurring button in a new invoice. These can even be sent out automatically once configured so you don’t need to worry that you’ve forgotten to invoice and will be gnawing on your fridge, which with any luck has accumulated the flavors of its former contents, for sustenance next month.

Paymo has a section for expenses, which can be easily categorized, assigned to clients, and there’s a section to upload a scan of a receipt. You can mark these as unbilled or invoiced, depending on whether you want to claim a tax deduction or just get the money back from a client.

Next time you are editing a draft invoice or creating a new invoice for that client, there will be a notification on the editor that says there are outstanding expenses. Click one button and they’ll be added to the invoice with the description and amounts filled in.

If you frequently do estimates in your line of work, there’s a feature for that. It works much like the regular invoicing tool.

Reporting

Paymo’s reporting makes it easy to generate custom reports and look over your business activity for any time period, from the current day to all time, which is something I’m fond of as a stats-and-charts junkie. It’s good to be able to see at a glance where most of your money is coming from versus where most of your time is spent, enabling you to make changes that improve efficiency and earnings.

You can get a rough idea of how much income you are looking at for the current month’s unbilled hours with stats on hours worked (sorted by either project or user), and a financial statistics chart that shows dollars billed and received per month, which is handy for seeing at a glance where overdue accounts receivable are.

You can view reports in the browser, and they can be downloaded in PDF or CSV format. I have a feeling that I won’t really be able to put Paymo’s reporting to test until I’ve got more data in the system — at least a month’s worth for any sort of report I’d base a decision on — but the system seems promising.

Team Management

Let’s skip the boring stuff, except for one quick sentence: you can create users easily enough and allow them an appropriate level of access to Paymo. But what sort of team management features does Paymo provide for business owners?

Running a distributed team means that while the working environment for each member is almost always more to their taste than an office with headache-inducing fluorescent lights and no fresh air, it’s harder to keep a boots-on-the-ground eye on how things are going and whether the hours are getting done.

Once you’ve set up a user’s working days and hours and they start tracking time, you can take a look at their user page, which shows the amount of time they spent working in the past week, and has a Performance meter. Obviously time worked isn’t the only measure of performance, but if your employees have been spending fewer hours than they’ve been getting paid for, you’ll want to know — and Paymo makes that easy.

You can view the user’s timesheets to get more details about the way they’ve spent their time, and see meters for every day in your Paymo account’s history that tells you how much of each work day was tracked.

It’s possible to set up ‘non-working days’ on a user-by-user basis, so that taking leave or a sick day doesn’t impact their performance rating. Finally, you can assign projects to users directly from their profile page.

API

Developers who want to build apps that work with Paymo, either for internal apps or for publicly available apps, are in luck. Paymo have an API that’s freely available to all users, with documentation that appears to be up-to-date with Paymo features.

Mobile

If you go out for a meeting once or twice a month, perhaps it’s easier to manually input time spent later on as I mentioned earlier. But if your business is all about making house calls and the like, or you just like to be accurate to the minute, a mobile app is the way to go.

There’s a capable, free Paymo timer available for the iPhone, but there doesn’t seem to be an official Android app yet. There is an unofficial Android app available — it’s great to see that the API is doing its job in ensuring that Paymo is as accessible as possible on a variety of platforms.

Pricing

There are three Paymo plans available. The first is free, and is great for those who just want a time tracker or freelancers with just a few regular clients. It includes three invoices per month, two users, 50MB of storage, unlimited clients and projects and the time tracking features.

The Basic plan at $9.99 per month drops the limit on invoices altogether and boosts the storage limit to 5GB. It’s designed for freelancers who need to send more than three invoices a month, and young startups.

Finally, the premium plan uses a per-user pricing model at $3.99 each, and applies to businesses who need more than two users to access Paymo. It currently supports up to 40 employees. Premium also gives users 15GB of data storage.

Competitors

Paymo has several well-established competitors in the freelance and small business-oriented invoicing and time-tracking arena, like Freshbooks and LessAccounting.

LessAccounting has some fantastic offerings but puts more of its focus on the money. It’s used for tracking expenses, creating and sending invoices, keeping track of accounts receivable and so on. It starts at $30 a month and has add-ons for the assistance of a real bookkeeper with packages for 6 hours of help per quarter ($70) and 7 hours of help per month ($270). The offering is solid but the pricing and the feature set mean that users looking for something like Paymo aren’t likely to find their solution here.

FreshBooks has been in the game longer, and are best known for their invoicing features. The free plan is constricted to unlimited invoices but for only three clients, and their entry-level paid plan is $19.95 and has a 25 client cap — twice as expensive as Paymo’s plan without client or invoice limitations. Their strengths lie in the ability to send an invoice via email that makes it a breeze for the client to pay online through a variety of payment gateways, including PayPal. Using this in practice doesn’t always seem to pan out with the majority of clients (at least in my experience) having specific instructions as to how invoices should be received. The interface looks better than it works — I find it a bit fiddly — and the company’s foray into time tracking and project management has generally produced poor tools.

Paymo is faced with some capable alternatives. But their strengths are clear, Paymo strikes me as the best all-rounder suite for freelancers and small businesses who need a platform for not just money management but project management.

The Bottom Line

I told you at the start: Paymo is the app I’ll be using to run my business starting next week. After searching for an app with a feature wishlist that is pretty much summarized by Paymo’s actual feature list, and an implementation that doesn’t make me hate time-tracking, I’m sold.

If you’re paying a fortune to run two apps like FreshBooks and Basecamp, chances are all the features you need are in Paymo (though if you need the extra power that Basecamp’s specialization in project management provides, you can sync your Paymo account with it).

It has got some rough edges, but I’ve seen the Paymo team’s iterative approach at work and new features are tackled quickly and tested early. Paymo checks my boxes now, but I’m confident that anything I’ll miss won’t be far behind.

With a free account plan that lets you test out the full feature set, there’s no risk in giving Paymo a try. I suggest you head on over and see for yourself.

North Social has unveiled the first three out of 11 video shorts showing how not to get people to like you on Facebook; we’ve got copies of the footage embedded at the bottom of this post.

The so-called “Fan Page Fail” series teaches that “desperation doesn’t work in social; people follow, like, and share brands that are entertaining, informative, and that provide value back,” said North Social Managing Partner David Brody.

Brody says the shorts all star a “socially reckless” character named Jonny Like. Here’s what he does in each of the shorts:

In “Street Preaching,” Jonny takes his cause to the pavement. With one megaphone, a creepy van, and one big ass thumb, he aggressively asks for pedestrians to like him on Facebook.
In “Beach Baller,” Jonny takes his awkward charm to the beach where he tries to work his moves and charm until his bad judgment and poor taste in body art forces a babe to unlike his game.
In “Dirty Urinal,” Jonny’s uninhibited enthusiasm quickly gets him more exposure than he bargains for in an invasive bathroom encounter. Lesson? It’s about the quality of the fan, not the quantity.

Readers, let us know what you think of the following three videos in the comments section beneath this post.

The Winklevoss twins had their original case against Facebook dismissed yesterday, causing tech media to write another slew of “The Winklevosses’ Case Against Facebook Is Over But Wait Actually It Isn’t” headlines. The seven-year battle is indeed not over, as the Winklevosses intend to file a motion under Rule 60b, which alleges that the Facebook withheld evidence during the first trial and hopes for a resettlement. The value of the Winklevoss Facebook shares is currently around $200 million (which is about $200 million more than I or probably any of you have).

This news comes shortly after former Harvard president Larry Summers called the twins “assholes” at the Fortune Brainstorm tech conference in Aspen, in response to a question about the veracity of a scene in “The Social Network.”

“One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they’re looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case,”

The twins responded to Summers’ comments by writing an official-looking letter to the current president of Harvard, condemning Summers’ actions, which only reinforced the “asshole” characterization for many.

Because wading through piles of legalese isn’t something that I (or you) can spend most of my time doing, for better or for worse, I don’t understand the ins and outs of the case. But, thanks to “The Social Network” and the simplification engine that is popular culture, the story of the Winklevoss twins versus Mark Zuckerberg is not about the fight over the minutiae of a breach of contract in most people’s minds; It’s about the battle of two archetypes, and the two parties have come to symbolize the two sides of the “execution” (Zuckerberg) versus “ideas” (the Winklevosses) debate.

Any entrepreneur worth their ramen will tell you that ideas are a dime a dozen; “Startup ideas are not million dollar ideas,” wrote Y Combinator founder Paul Graham “and here’s an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one.”

Larry Summers’ comment about the Winklevosses being assholes because they wore suits to a meeting appeals directly to the Silicon Valley myth of a bunch of dudes wearing hoodies and TEVAs drinking Mountain Dew in a house in Palo Alto while they casually build the next billion dollar company. I’m betting that’s no accident; Summers has slowly made inroads into Silicon Valley, is on the board of Square and is an advisor at Andreessen Horowitz. Moreover Summers actually met Marc Andreessen (who is on the board of Facebook) through his protegé, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Sorkin’s masterful “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook,” line pretty much sums up the collective ethos of an industry that’s seen Friendster replaced by Myspace replaced by Facebook and lived through “RIP Good Times” to only see more good times. Welcome to Northern California, we don’t like old money and we don’t like patent trolls. “Hustle over entitlement” should be our state motto.

Indeed, when I asked why Silicon Valley had such vehement feelings about what the twins symbolize on Twitter and yes Facebook, I was overwhelmed with similar responses, “The valley is filled with people who were misfits in school in a world filled with Winklevosses,” said Redpoint VC Satish Dharmaraj said on Twitter. “The Valley knows that the idea was not ground breaking or new. Execution is everything. + some luck,” he said.

“It really feels like two jock assholes tried to take money from the little nerdy guy,” said valley veteran , “The right thing for them to do would have been to start-up a competitor to Facebook and not call sour grapes the whole time.”

partner Shervin Pishevar gave a longer explanation on Quora,

“If the Winklevii had spent all their time and energy competing with Facebook in the arena of the marketplace rather than in the confines of the courtroom, we here in Silicon Valley would have had more sympathy and respect regardless of whether they had failed or succeeded. If you want our respect, gear up and enter the arena of entrepreneurship and be willing to die and battle for your idea to win the hearts and minds of those in the stands. The users who vote with their time, money and passion count here- nothing else. No court order or settlement can give you the legitimacy and honor that hundreds of millions of users can. Merit matters more. Always.”

Summers’ character in The Social Network also sums it up, “Harvard undergraduates believe that inventing a job is better than finding a job. So I suggest again that the two of you come up with a new project … The two of you being here is wrong! It’s not worthy of Harvard, it’s not what Harvard saw in you. You don’t get special treatment.”

I’m sure hundreds if not thousands of entrepreneurs silently cheered at that part.

Movies are really good at caricatures, but, as the leaked Zuckerberg IMs show, reality has many facets — the Winklevosses are Olympians (which is an accomplishment is it not?) and I’ve met plenty of assholes wearing hoodies. And as we brace ourselves for the second round of Winklevosses’ versus Facebook there’s one thing that’s clear, whatever the fight is about it goes way beyond money, especially for all of us on the sidelines.

[crunchbase url="http://www.crunchbase.com/company/facebook" name="Facebook"]

It wasn’t all that long ago, in the scope of actual years, that we were communicating via BBS. Some of you might remember those. You’d sign in, via your 14.4 modem (though truth be told, the BBS dates back to the days of the 600 baud modem), post your thoughts and see what others were saying. If we’re going to look at a history of social networks via computers, then the BBS has to be high on that list.

But my how times have changed. As technology evolves, we continually reach into new and different directions in order to find that next big thing. It’s with that in mind that the title of this piece comes into play. There is no such thing as “future-proof”, and that rings especially true when it comes to communication via social networks.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Google+ (and rightly so) because it has done a lot of things right that Facebook has yet to fix. But I think that we have to reach further back, to more non-traditional definitions, to see where we’ve come from. In doing so, we should be able to see where we’re going and we’ll also see precisely what Google+ is already doing wrong.

From the early days of email and BBS, we didn’t get much of a change until the 1990s. ISPs such as AOL and Prodigy offered the ability to create profiles, chat with other users and send in-house mail. While these features are primarily how we define social networks today, the ISP-run networks were missing one gigantic factor – outside reach. Once easily-manufactured websites became standard, things started on the course where we find ourselves today.

Geocities

It might have been filled with animated GIFs and bad MIDI files, but Geocities was, at its heart, a very early version of social networking. Often times people would build websites in the different “cities”, covering aspects and interests that fit inside of them. If you wanted to build a website to just talk about yourself (consider this early ego-blogging) then you would need to categorize yourself by your interests and then build inside of the city that fit the categorization.

Ultimately Geocities saw its demise not because of a lack of ability but because it simply didn’t keep up with what people were wanting. As ideas grew, the city walls could no longer hold them. More and better tools for building websites became readily available and Geocities’ users left it a ghost town.

The story of Tripod was much the same. It offered easy-to-build sites, had an arguably better domain structure and even offered the ability to direct your domain to the site for hosting. It was less of a network than Geocities, but it was instrumental in helping to form our next version of social networking.

Webrings

You remember these, right? Sometime during the boom of Geocities and Tripod (and to a lesser extent, Angelfire) groups of people with similar interests would join a “ring” of other sites, exchanging links with them. Often times, these rings would even have navigation bars that would allow you to push a button and be linked directly to the next site inside the ring.

It’s somewhat arguable that these webrings could be classified as early social networks, but I think that they hold a big part of what has formed the networks that we see today. These shared interests are incredibly important and help us to connect to people that we might not otherwise have known. If that fact isn’t innately social then my entire definition is skewed.

Through the better part of the 1990s, both ISP-run and self-made sites continued to contribute to early social networking. In fact, nothing much changed until we got into the new decade, specifically 2002.

Friendster, MySpace and Facebook

We were obviously looking for a change. While people weren’t then (and still aren’t) ready to give up their personal websites, they were looking for easier ways to connect. There were inherent difficulties with creating a network out of separately run and hosted sites and therein lies the imperfection that brought about Friendster.

Often credited (inaccurately, if I might say so myself) as the first social network, Friendster grew massively and rapidly, to the point that 1 in about every 126 Internet users was on the site. It spawned in its wake a slew of other sites including MySpace, Tribe.net, Jaiku and LinkedIn, each trying to capitalize on points that Friendster didn’t originally.

In fact, even today’s behemoth Facebook was a specialized clone of MySpace that was directed initially at college students. But Facebook has done what networks before it failed to do in trying to encompass more of the Internet within its walls. In doing so, it has often been compared to the second coming of AOL.

With the launch of Google+, it’s easy to argue that it is inherently similar to Facebook. The main differences lie in a lack of (often-times annoyingly invasive) social games and the thought that sharing in groups should be easier than Facebook’s version of the same function. While the fanboys of each service will surely flame me for this statement, Google+ thus far is still copying the Friendster methodology of things.

Many are touting the explosive growth of Google+ (20 million users in 3 weeks is nothing short of stunning) as testament to the company’s ability to do social “right”. However, I’ll argue that and say that the growth is simple to explain — When Friendster launched, and even Facebook 2 years later, people weren’t sold on the idea of a social network by that definition. Now, 9 years later, we are. Google+ has done well in capitalizing on its dominance of the Internet and it should be applauded. However, it hasn’t done anything that is inherently different from those sites that we were using in 2002.

This goes back to my earlier statement where I said that we would see precisely what Google is doing wrong with the service. By subscribing to (essentially) the same view of social networking as we have for the previous 9 years, there’s not yet an obvious drive to move us forward. The Internet as a whole is inherently social already, so even Google’s self-serving +1 ranking system and its hope of creating the social graph for the entire Internet has already been done.

Interestingly, what we’ve actually seen out of social networks is a lot of failed experiments and an eventual return to what we were doing 20 years ago. With the days of BBS, chances are that you had a lot in common with the people to whom you were sharing your thoughts. We tried to move away from that, thinking that our location or a wider reach could ultimately be the solution, but then we’ve found (with Google+) that what we really want is what we already had — The easy way to gather and share information and conversation with like-minded people.

Google+ isn’t perfect. Far from it, in fact. But by that realization, we also have to understand that we don’t yet have a true definition of what “perfect” would be. In fact, I’d venture to say that we never will. Due simply to the fact that we as people are ever-changing, so too are our expectations. We’ve found things to scratch our itches (Twitter, Foursquare and other, more niche-oriented ideas do this) as they happen but we can never really tell when that next itch will come along.

The perfect social network will never exist because we as humans won’t let that happen. We refuse to be happy with “good enough” and that’s a very good thing. Because of this fact, we will always want more and better services, even if they’re only helping us to accomplish what we’ve already been doing for years. The companies that win in this endless race will be those that can spot the itches as they happen, then be ready to scratch them until the next one comes along.

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at LeadBolt, Metamoki, Inc., Context Optional, Kabam, Glu Mobile, Spooky Cool Labs,  and Ubisoft.

• Publisher Sales Manager-Digital
• Advertising Sales Director-Digital

• Senior Backend Software Engineer
• Backend Software Engineer

• Account Manager — Social Marketing
• Software Trainer–Social Marketing Suite
• Software Trainer–Social Marketing Suite
• Ruby on Rails Developer – Product Suite

• Mobile Art Director
• UX Director
• Senior 2D Artist
• Senior UX Specialist
• UI/UX Artist

• Design Director
• Customer Insights Analyst
• Senior Producer
• Technical Director

• Software Engineer – Games Front End / Unity
• Software Engineer – Games
• User Interface Expert – Social Games

• Game Server Engineer

• Associate Active Game Manager
• Games Metrics Analyst
• Build Engineer SOCIAL NETWORK GAMES
• Release Manager SOCIAL NETWORK GAMES
• Associate Active Game Manager

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Andrew Keen, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — convened for yet another G+ conversation. This one, however, was noted for its evenhandedness as @ajkeen and @scobleizer traded social blows over the new Google service. As someone in the Friendfeed chat on the livecast noted, @stevegillmor seems surprisingly positive about the new service. As Keen observed, that’s because I think the new service is Friendfeed revisited.

Of course, it is. But it’s also Twitter without the 140 character limit, Facebook without the unseen authority algorithm, and the Gillmor Gang without a human director (Hangouts). @kevinmarks says it a little differently, seeing G+ growth gaining on Club Penguin. And that’s the fundamental reason Google has a winner, by underlining the best parts of each of these services and floating all boats on a rising tide.

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A man in California who was caught not only , but storing and sharing folders with nude or semi-nude images of the women was sentenced to four years in jail on Friday by a state judge.

George Bronk was able to use clues on Facebook to guess the security questions to user’s profiles. Once he got into an account he would search for nude pictures or videos women sent their husbands or boyfriends, and then distribute the images to all those women’s friends.

(Warning: It doesn’t matter how difficult your password is to guess if you make your security question something obvious. For example, if you choose “what was the name of your highschool?” for your security question, but you display the name of your highschool on Facebook, you can probably easily get hacked).

Bronk would send emails of the photos to the woman’s families, friends, and coworkers in more than 17 different states, the District of Columbia, and England, according to Associated Press.

“This case serves as a stark example of what occurs in so-called cyberspace. It has very real consequences,” Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Lawrence Brown said. “The intrusion of one’s profile is no different than intruding one’s home.”

Bronk received eight more months for charges related to child pornography.

His attorney, Monica Lynch, had sought a sentence of one year in local jail followed by probation, or two years in state prison with no probation. The judge rejected her plea for a lighter sentence, saying Bronk was no different from a peeping Tom.

At a hearing earlier this year, his mother, Joyce Bronk, said her son told her he needed help for a drinking problem. He was allegedly attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and taking classes to be trained as an emergency medical technician, according to reports.

His mom told AP, “This was an Internet persona he created when he was a drunk.”

His dreams to be a paramedic will never be able to come to fruition, as he’ll have to register as a sex offender once he gets out of the slammer, his attorney said.

Do you think Bronk received a fair sentence?

has taken off like no other social network before it. While it’s still in ‘limited field trial’ mode, it’s already being seriously considered as a contender to take on Twitter and Facebook. Journalists already use both those networks to great effect. Could Google+ see similar usage?

Some journalists have already started experimenting with Google+ as a way to share, discuss or source news. Here are a few examples:

• , Senior Editor at The Atlantic, is running an “experiment in real-time news” called , which he posts each day to his Google+ account. It comprises links to Atlantic stories, details of what he and other Atlantic journalists are working on that day, links to news on other websites and a photograph for the day.
• , an American television journalist at KOMU in Missouri, used a yesterday to bring together Norwegians to talk together from different locations about the Oslo bombing. This was recorded and broadcast on TV.
• has been taking advantage of  the ability to edit posts on Google+ by turning it into a  tool.
• , the technology correspondent for Channel 4 News at ITN in the UK, has used Google+ as a multimedia extension to his tweets, breaking news relating to the News International phone-hacking scandal, and then linking to it in tweets to help drive traffic to them from Twitter.

So, what makes Google+ an appealing journalistic tool? Benjamin Cohen tells me that the combination of speed, ease of use and the way it encourages discussions makes it potentially very powerful.

“If you take the example of the statement Rupert and James Murdoch were refused permission to give at the (UK government) Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, News Corporation released that to the press and I had it on Google+ within twenty seconds of receiving it. If I had put it on the Channel 4 News website, it would have taken a lot longer – I’d have had to wait for the content management system to load, and perhaps had my article checked by an editor before it was published,” Cohen explains.

“The feedback is better than Twitter too,” he continues. “While I might get a lot of replies on Twitter, it’s difficult for others to see the full scope of the conversation because they can’t necessarily see what others are saying. Google+ may lack brevity, but it’s better for discussion.”

Cohen adds that Google+ is also useful for identifying where mistakes might have been made. Users being able to ‘+1′ comments as well as posts makes it potentially easy to see where a particular commenter might have an important point that needs addressing. Additionally, there’s the potential to easily identify new leads for stories amongst the comments – leads which may be lost on Twitter as retweets can quickly push them off the Mentions stream.

What about Facebook?

Facebook has made a concerted effort of late to encourage journalists to use its platform in their work. There are definitely strengths to Facebook as a reporting tool, not least access to its 750,000,000 active users. However, while he admits Facebook is a much greater driver of traffic to news websites such as the Pink News site he also runs, Benjamin Cohen sees Google+ as offering a number of advantages despite its current small user-base.

“Being able to edit mistakes is an important thing – you can’t edit something you’ve posted to Facebook once it’s published, you have to delete it and then all the comments and likes are lost too. On Google+ you can edit as you go. If you write something inaccurate on Twitter or Facebook, it’s difficult to deal with, but posts on Google+ can be edited for accuracy as needed.” Cohen has also built a larger audience on Google+ than his on Facebook. At the time of writing, his Facebook Page has 752 ‘Likes’, while he’s in 1,364 people’s circles on Google+.

Not everyone sees Google+ as the future…yet

However, not everyone sees Google+ with such a rosy glow. , the Social Media Editor at news agency Reuters, tells me that he finds it currently has too small and specific an audience to be useful as a mainstream journalistic tool.

“It’s good for discussion, sort of like the old school BBS (Bulletin Board System), but morphed with the Facebook wall,” says DeRosa. “It’s mostly full of tech and media people so it’s a bit too insidery to really spread across many topics. It tends to be a bit geeky and not mainstream enough to be interesting beyond the topics that my media and tech friends care about. Our readers want to know about a wide variety of topics and Google+ just doesn’t have diverse enough an audience yet to get into them. I’ll go to Google+ as my last social media platform, usually when I am trying to kick back a bit and have time to read more and respond in a longer format.”

While DeRosa uses Twitter as his go-to social network (“It’s a signal and a way to gather more information by way of sources, be it a traditional journalist or just someone who happened to be in the right place at the right time.”) and sees Facebook as attractive due to its audience size and the ability to create “a slightly more personalized space”, he notes another service as worth considering – Tumblr.

“Tumblr actually, in my opinion, gives a journalist the most creative platform to really personalize their space completely,” says DeRosa. “ and CJ Chivers are two really great examples of that. There are countless other journalists there, I’m actually surprised they don’t yet have their own Vadim Lavrusik (Facebook’s Journalism Program Manager) type person at Tumblr. They’re missing a great opportunity there to really help get journos what they need. Mark Coatney is the closest thing they have to that, he’s with , along with were the first mainstream media publications to make a splash on Tumblr.”

How Google+ can improve its offering to journalists

Both Benjamin Cohen and Anthony DeRosa have practical suggestions for how Google can better serve journalists with its social network.

Cohen notes that television journalists like him may use it in a different way to online journalists due to the fact that they don’t necessarily have to worry about driving traffic to their websites and can instead use it to break news in a way that may help surface new leads to use in their TV reports. This is an argument borne out by Sarah Hill’s successful use of a Hangout to cover the Norwegian tragedy, as mentioned above. However, Cohen notes that official short URLs to profiles are essential so that TV shows can direct viewers to Google+ to continue a discussion.

For DeRosa, meanwhile, it’s all about scale and Google playing to its strengths by integrating its other services. “Until they have as many (users) as Facebook, it will be a niche that (journalists will) use last and focus their attention where the most eyeballs are. The level of feedback and engagement at Google+ seems high, despite much lower numbers than Facebook, so that’s in their favor. I think Google should try to do something interesting to tie together what a journalist has on Google News and create some custom feed just for that journalist that they can somehow pull into their profile.”

Meanwhile, on his Google+ profile yesterday, DeRosa made a in light of the events in Norway. Google+ lacks a proper search function and the convenient tool that is the hashtag. “I Love Google+ but it doesn’t hold a candle to following #Oslo news today. I woke up and didn’t leave TweetDeck pretty much the entire time. Google+ will be great to discuss it at some point but for fast breaking news and stories, Twitter is and always will be king.”

The future of Google+ lies with the user-base it develops and how those users choose to use it, but early experiments show that it’s certainly getting off to an interesting start as a way to source and report stories. Still, it has a long way to go to seriously challenge Twitter.

Editor’s note: Yoav Shoham is professor of computer science at Stanford University and co-founder of Katango, which organizes Facebook friends into groups

The recent introduction of Google+ has been fodder for much Google-versus-Facebook discussion. At the center of the discussion has been the component of , which allows users to arrange their contacts in meaningful clusters (for example, “family” and “work”) and share different content with different clusters. Circles play a role that’s almost entirely analogous to Facebook’s lists, which have been around (if somewhat buried in the Facebook UI) for a long time. Facebook of course also has the notion of groups, separate from (and more recent than) lists. Here are some basic observations on lists, groups and circles that seem to have been glossed over in the various recent articles.

• This recent discussion has focused on the differences between the Facebook and Google offerings, but misses what I think is a more basic common – and striking – feature. They both ask the user to create groups/lists/circles manually. This works fine for groups with a small and stable membership; family, for example. But it’s a non-solution for large and/or fluid groups.
• About six months ago I went through the exercise of sorting my then-321 Facebook friends into lists. It was excruciating. It took me over an hour to do a halfway decent job, and I wasn’t fun to be around when I was done. I’m now up to 388 friends; you couldn’t pay me to go through that exercise again. Facebook statistics confirm that I’m not alone (only 5% of the users have created lists, for example).
• Facebook has had a creative solution—switch from lists to groups. The idea was that whereas only you can create and maintain your lists, a group is maintained collaboratively by all its members. In a twist on the familiar newsgroup self-subscription, in Facebook groups one needs an invitation; only existing members can add new members. (Both lists and groups are still supported on Facebook, though most users are not aware of these subtleties.)
• But this does not solve the problem. Groups are not lists. My lists define me socially; they are my social mirror. They are mine alone and I’ll be damned if I let you touch them. I’ll decide who’s in my family circle, my AI cohorts, my tech-guru list, my college-friends cluster.
• Of course, my lists overlap with yours. Indeed some are pretty darn similar. My wife’s family list has an 80% overlap with mine. This can be confusing, especially when we start using these lists to communicate. When my wife shares a photo with her family list and I with mine it can be hard to tell the two lists apart; both because the names of the lists may be identical (“Shoham family”, say, with apologies to the Eliasaf brand), and because the two sets of people are almost identical. For this reason we see a natural dynamic in which people with fairly similar lists tend over time to “standardize” on the same list. An informal rule of thumb I use – not verified in any way – is that lists will merge if their overlap is 75% or greater.
• This doesn’t mean that groups aren’t important. This is especially true when there is an objectively-defined membership criterion. Membership in “Stanford class of ‘02” is not a matter of taste or opinion; you either were there or not (I’m sidestepping subtle issues, such as do we mean you graduated in ’02 or started in ’99). This group may (or may not) be part of my social mirror, but it can safely be constructed by others. Even when there’s not a pre-defined membership set, a group makes sense when there is an objective, impersonal concept defining it. Anyone can add themselves (as in newsgroups) or their friends (as in Facebook groups) to the “cat lovers” group, if it’s not meant to include only my cat-loving friends; it’s fine for it to grow organically. Finally, as multiple similar lists coalesce over time around one list (perhaps following the 75% rule), at that point the list in effect has also been “untethered” and become a member-maintained group.
• (As an aside, philosophers and logicians have a lot to say about these issues, involving concepts such as “sense” and “reference”, “intension” and “extension”, “notation” and “denotation”, but you need to like that sort of thing to spend more time on it. I do, but it’s a lonely hobby.)
• Ok, so if groups are not the solution, how do you avoid the pain of list creation and maintenance? I believe the answer is algorithms; they do 95% of the work, and the remaining 5% is manageable and even fun. There are many algorithms that produce sets of people; clustering algorithms, of the kind powering Katango’s first product release, are an example (yes, I am completely biased here). The output of the algorithm is “almost right”. Almost always, each emergent cluster makes sense, but you need to hone it: name the cluster (reliable auto-naming still eludes even the best algorithms), add and remove a few names (usually more removing than adding; by design, the system usually over-includes friends since removing is a simple mouse-click away), create a sub-cluster (for example, create an “immediate family cluster” from an “extended family” one), merge clusters, and so on.  This final honing is fun rather than a chore, for several reasons. First, it’s quick; a matter of minutes. Second, it’s rewarding to see your social mirror emerge; one user described examining a new emergent cluster as “unwrapping a present”. And third, it’s your social universe, and at the end of the day you know it best. The algorithm did the heavy lifting, but like an expert surgeon, you stepped in and made it perfect; you feel in control.
• In an interesting recent TechCrunch piece, Tom Anderson lauded the fact that Google+ hands the user control over his/her social experience, and lamented Facebook’s over-reliance on EdgeRank-style algorithms to decide what information the user ought to see. I think that’s only half justified. One cannot master the social torrent without some algorithmic assistance, any more than one can navigate the web without algorithmic assistance. There’s a reason we use Google more often than Yahoo to find relevant web pages. But as I say above, I agree with Tom that at the end of the day the user must be given final control of his/her social interaction.

So, the main takeaways:  Don’t confuse lists or circles with groups; and let algorithms do the heavy lifting.

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To celebrate the fact that my vacation during the last two weeks of August has been officially confirmed (!), I am posting the most massive infographic I have ever seen: “The Social Travel Revolution” brought to you by the folks at still-in-beta travel startup Tripl.

Most shocking statistic: 50% of all Americans are on Facebook (155 million) while only 37% of Americans have a passport (115 million). To its credit, the Facebook onboarding process is a lot more streamlined.

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Facebook Spent 320K on Lobbying in 2Q – TechCrunch reported this week that Facebook spent $320,000 on lobbying in the second quarter; the company has already surpassed its 2010 total lobbying spend in the first two quarters of this year.

Judge Dismisses Second Winklevoss Lawsuit –  Reuters today reported that Facebook was awarded a dismissal of a second lawsuit filed by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. The suit, filed in Boston, had sought to bring the twins more money on top of the $65 million settlement they had already received as the outcome of a suit claiming they came up with the idea for Facebook.

Facebook Testing a Phonebook App – VentureBeat reported that Facebook may be testing a phonebook app for mobile users, allowing them to see their contacts on Facebook as a phonebook and then dial them directly from the Facebook app on their phones. However, this could have been developed by Google to deepen the integration of Facebook with its mobile OS.

“Who Owns Facebook?” Website - Venture capital directory publisher Massinvestor has launched a website called  that features profiles of all of Facebook’s biggest stock holders.

Fraction of Facebook for iPhone Users Complaint About Bugs – The Financial Times reported this week that there is a “revolt” amongst Facebook for iPhone users regarding bugs in the latest version of the app. In fact, the 20,000 users complaining make up just a tiny fraction of the app’s 84 million monthly users, and therefore does not represent widespread discontent.

Which Facebook Employees are on Google+? – AllFacebook this week that a slew of Facebook employees are on Google+, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and several members of the executive team. Here’s a of some of them.

Harvard President Slams Winklevoss Bros – Larry Summers, who was president of Harvard University when the Winklevoss twins had their spat with Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of Facebook, seems to have been no fan of the brothers. He basically called them a vulgar name, hinting that they are jerks.

Talenthouse to Develop Fan Skill Competition Apps - Talenthouse is a platform for running promotions on Facebook where fans can compete to donate their skills, such as blogging or video editing, to help complete projects for their favorite celebrities. AllThingsD reports that the company has signed a deal to provide apps for Universal Music Group artists.

Facebook Report: Engaging Readers on Pages – Facebook released an of user engagement with posts by the Pages of news organizations Pages, noting the influence of thumbnail images, post length, photos, questions and more. This study fell in line with one we earlier of journalist Pages.

Other Announcements:

Buddy Media Expands to Europe – Buddy Media announced this week that it would open a European headquarters in London.

myYearbook, Quepasa Merge – myYearbook and the Quepasa Corporation agreed to merge this week, bringing the social game developer and Latino social network together. The $100 million deal reaches across Latin America, includes 70 million registered users, 2.2 million mobile app installs and 11.5 million mobile game installs.

French MXP4 Opens US Office, Signs Deal – French developer of music-based social games MXP4 will move business operations of its Bopler Games unit to a new office in Los Angeles, closer to US record labels. The week prior, MXP4 signed a deal with EMI to bring the music of the record label’s artists into Bopler Games.

Wispor Launches Using Faceboom Comments Plugin – Wispor is a newly launched discussion-based social network where users can start conversations about any topic. The site is built on top of the Facebook Comments Box social plugin in what appears to be the deepest integration of the commenting widget to date.

Third-Party Facebook Photos App Pixable Adds Video – Pixable, a Facebook app we’ve  that helps users sort through all the photos their friends upload, now allows users to browse videos uploaded or shared by their Facebook friends.

RootMusic BandPage Launches Social Touring Feature – BandPage, a Facebook app that allows bands to set up a profile and stream their music, has with concert date tracking services Songkick, Bandsintown, and SonicLiving. The Social Touring feature allows musicians to automatically have their tour dates imported to their BandPage from these services.

Gotta love Tom Anderson. Newly reinvigorated by the launch of Google+, “MySpace Tom” has become (and regular TechCrunch contributor!). As a man at the forefront of the early days of the social wars, he’s obviously full of information. And today he decided to share a bit more. This time, it’s a fascinating story about the time Microsoft, not Google, was about to land the MySpace ad deal.

In a comment on (where else) , Anderson tells the story in response to my most recent post about the Google/Facebook war before Google+. Based on a Quora thread, I noted that the 2006 search/ad deal Google signed with MySpace (Fox Interactive Media) may have been the true kick-off of hostilities between Google and Facebook. As a result, Microsoft signed Facebook — which later led to the famous investment.

But as Anderson tells it, it almost didn’t happen that way. In fact, it was Microsoft that was just about to sign the MySpace search/ad deal. “The reason we ended up going with Google search is because I ran into John Doerr and told him we were about to close with Microsoft. Within an hour, Google brass helicoptered out to a News Corp. shindig at Pebble Beach,” Anderson says, noting that he wasn’t allowed in the closed-door meeting where negotiations took place. This resulted in the billion-dollar deal.

“The terms were so screwed up, that it had a big impact (a negative one) on MySpace’s future,” Anderson writes. “Things would have been quite different if that deal hadn’t happened,” he goes on to say.

A few more awesome things about this info:

1) Again, Anderson is leaving this comment on Google+ — the new service by the company whose ad deal way back when helped seal the fate of his company.

2) Anderson says this was actually the first and only time he had ever met Doerr.

3) Vic Gundotra, now the man in charge of the Google+ project, was on the other side at the time, trying to get the ad deal done for Microsoft (Gundotra left Microsoft for Google shortly before the MySpace deal was finalized). This is how Anderson met Gundotra, in fact.

4) Anderson says he had forgotten all of this info until my post.

Indulge me here for a second.

Just think about what would have been had Anderson not run into Doerr? Microsoft would have likely closed the MySpace deal, perhaps with better terms for MySpace. Google, presumably, would have then gone after a similar deal with Facebook. This perhaps would have given them a leg up a year later to do a Facebook investment, instead of Microsoft.

If my wild speculation holds, the Internet would have been a very different place right now. It may have been a place for Google and Facebook to be friends. In a relationship, even.

If you pride yourself in your geekery, then there are a few things that are essential to your office. Whether you fancy yourself a minimalist, a bit extravagant or somewhere in between, wearing the geek badge is like joining a team. You need to don the uniform.

Fortunately for you, this uniform doesn’t require cheap polo shirts and ill-fitting pants, but rather quintessential office stuff. I say stuff because it doesn’t all fit into one category, so let’s go down the list.

Great Speakers or Headphones

Let’s face facts, even the best of laptop speakers still suck. Fortunately, you don’t have to break the bank or run yourself short on space in order to get some top-notch audio. Brands like Logitech are renowned for making great-sounding audio equipment that will save both space and cash, such as its Z623 THX-rated speaker system.

If waking up your neighbors or disturbing your office-mates is a concern, shoot for some headphones. We’ll stick with ear buds so that you can easily stash them in a bag. I did a round-up of four great ones that are all under $50 which you can read here but if I had my choice, I’d have to go with the . Oh yeah, they’ll run you more than $400, but they’re worth every penny for drowning out that cubicle slave next to you with pristine audio serenity.

Device Charging Station

If you don’t have one yet, get one. There’s nothing quite as annoying as trying to shuffle around 5 different cables with 2 USB ports, especially when you end up unplugging your keyboard or mouse. iDapt’s i4 should fit the bill nicely, offering you 3 exchangeable ”tips”, then a spare USB charging port on the side.

Cheeky Movie Memorabilia

Maybe you’re a huge fan of Office Space (aren’t we all?) or perhaps Clerks is more your style. Whatever the case, you have to have a nod, at least somewhere, to your favorite flicks. In my office, it’s Lord of the Rings, thanks to my other half. We have a life-sized bust of a goblin that we’ve named Reggie. He’s found a home on top of a book shelf.

Maybe you don’t have room for something that big. Never fear, stores such as ThinkGeek have you covered with items like the famous red Swingline stapler. Whatever room you have, make sure you have paid homage to the Hollywood greats (or not-so-greats) somewhere.

Rechargeable Batteries

There’s nothing worse than being 3 hours into your frag-fest…err…I mean data entry work…and having your mouse batteries go dead. Well, OK, not being able to find spares around makes that situation suck a lot more.

It’s for times just like these that you should plop down a few bucks on a set of rechargeable batteries. In fact, make sure you have enough to power all of your devices, plus having a set fully charged for when the inevitable happens. Not only will it keep your frustrations low, it will also help to create less waste by eliminating the need to throw away the dead ones.

If you are in an office that gets a fair amount of sun, I’m a big fan of that will get you juiced back up with solar power. Since small batteries such as these don’t hold loads of power, it doesn’t take long to get them filled back up and it keeps another plug from running up your electric bill.

Something Green

Humor me here for a bit. If you haven’t managed to get something to stay alive in your office, you should give it another try. I don’t know the scientific reasons behind it, but having a living plant in your office just makes things nicer. In fact, if you work in a noisy environment, a broad, leafy plant can even cut down on the ambient noise.

There are other options out there, too, for those of you whose thumbs are more black than green. If you’re the type of person that forgets to water your cat, try a Philodendron or a Jade plant. African Violets are great for a splash of color beyond green. Any of these can manage to go the better part of a couple of weeks without dying due to a lack of water. Just keep them in some light, pour out your water cup into them at the end of the day and you’ll be set.

Need a geek spin to make you feel at home? Here’s a project that you can do which will remind you to water your plants by letting them talk to you.

Proper Lighting

While nothing can beat the light from that big ball of gas in the sky, it’s not always the best light to have when you’re trying to work on a reflective screen. It’s incredibly difficult to direct sunlight, but the benefits of that type of light are well known.

For those of you stuck in cubicle hell, try adding a sunlight desk lamp. These little guys will give you the benefits of sunlight, without having to work by a window all day. Better yet, they’re directional so you can keep them from reflecting your own face back at you all day.

Look, we may be the pasty-skinned and proud of the world, but there’s no reason to be the ones with eye strain and seasonal depression.

A Great Keyboard

How you define a great keyboard is going to vary greatly from person to person. I’ve used loads of them over the years and my present favorite is still Apple’s USB keyboard with the keypad. I’ve tried using the Bluetooth, smaller version, but I tend to use the keypad too much to go without it.

If you want to earn some real geek cred, though, you’ll need to buckle down and grab yourself something like the Das Keyboard (pictured above). Designed for those of us who have an addiction to that click-clack sound from the old IBM PS-2 keyboards, the Das Keyboard has a model that doesn’t even bother with screening the keys. After all, you know where they are, right?

Proper Book Displays

Chances are, you’ve collected a mass of books over the years. Between manuals, “Idiots Guides” and just old favorites, you’ve probably got drawers and shelves stuffed with them. While we might be in the digital era, no Kindle can ever compare with kicking back with a nice copy of an MCSE or Cisco certification guide.

You’ve gathered them, so do them justice and display them properly. Whether it’s with a trippy, like the ones pictured here or some other choice, a good book collection is the sign of true geek credibility. Show those things off proudly.

I’m sure you have some others, but this is my essential list. Granted, mine goes a bit deeper because I have entire boxes full of cables and audio gear that no self-respecting audio geek could live without, but this should be a great start for the rest of us. So what did I miss? Drop a comment below and tell me what needs to be in my office next.

When Facebook shows users news feed stories about events their friends have RSVP’d to, it now also shows photos uploaded to the event’s wall. These photos should make event stories more eye-catching and increase earned RSVPs. Event admins should therefore add wall photos to their events to gain news feed visibility.

The Events feature hasn’t received many major changes over the years, to contrast with other Facebook products that seem to be in constant flux. Here are the minor changes that have been implemented since 2009:

• August 2009 – Facebook makes it easier to invite the same set of friends to multiple events by adding .
• May 2010 – Facebook begins and allows users to manage RSVPs from the home page. It also adds an to facilitate spontaneous and last minute even creation.
• July 2010 – Facebook to look more similar to business Pages.
• December 2010 –  Facebook introduces a special news feed story about .
• March 2011 – Users gain the ability to , rather than just Places.

Now, if users RSVP to a Facebook event that has had photos uploaded to it’s wall, these photos will be displayed in the news feed story about the RSVP. A user’s friends can then click to view these photos in-line. Unfortunately, these stories don’t appear to pull in photos accompanying check-ins by friends. The inclusion of check-in photos in the feed story could help users find out what an event in progress looks like in real-time.

Because the RSVP stories about events with wall photos appear much bigger in the news feed, we recommend that all event promoters upload additional photos to the walls of their events to take advantage of this opportunity for more news feed exposure. This will help them attain more RSVPs, and remind those have RSVP’d to attend.

[Thanks to  for the tip]

Are you friends with on Facebook? Thanks to , you can be.

The stock exchange launched a Thursday night, powered by Buddy Media, that offers fans photos, video, gaming, and breaking news.

Features on the Nasdaq OMX Facebook page include: New Listings Corner, which introduces companies that are new to the stock exchange; exclusive video featuring subjects from the worlds of business, sports, and nonprofit; opening and closing bell photos; and games such as What’s Your Prediction, which asks users to pick which of three indices — Nasdaq, Dow Jones, or the S&P 500 — will perform best on any given day.

Readers, do you or will you like Nasdaq’s new Facebook page?

Admittedly, it might seem a bit strange to see a bean bag being talked about here on TNW Gadgets, but you’ll have to humor me for a few minutes. Believe me, it’s worth your time.

The pitch went like any other product that we review. Sumo Lounge dropped us an email and asked if we’d like to review one of their products. We could pick any one that we wanted, so I of course opted for being a bit over the top and requested that they send over their biggest model, known as the Gigantor.

Long ago I had stated that my office was going to be as much of a relaxed atmosphere as I could make it. I’ve shopped around quite a bit for furniture to accomplish that and I had finally decdied to give the bags a try. Most of what I’ve found though were prohibitively expensive and didn’t offer much in the way of accessories in case something were to happen to them. If you got a rip, you were just out a few hundred bucks.

So let’s look at the Sumo Lounge stuff. First off, I’ll say that if you order a Gigantor, be prepared. It’s freaking huge. By way of measurement it is 86 inches in circumference by 60 inches across and 40 inches high. So yes, it’s a large, roughly-cylindrical poof that will be sitting in your floor.

When it arrives, it will be vacuum-packed inside of a plastic bag, then the bag is in a box. The box will be strapped to keep it from exploding because there’s simply not a good way to keep this thing contained otherwise. Opening the box and bag, you’ll want to have it roughly in the position that you want it to stay because it weighs in at roughly 80 pounds.

There are two parts to the Sumo Lounge bags. An inner liner keeps the foam in place, but does have an area that you can unzip to fill it with more foam if that need arises. More on that later. The outside portion is a cover, in your choice of microsuede or coruroy, in a range of colors. I chose microsuede, in “Funky Brown”. The cover is thick, with a heavy duty zipper that holds it all together. Sliding it on and getting it zipped was no problem as the bag rolls around very easily to allow the zipper full motion.

It says on the included material that it could take up to 24 hours for the foam inside to fully expand after you place it. I found the actual time to be much faster, in the range of about 4 hours. What’s interesting about the foam that Sumo Lounge uses is that it’s not your typical (read “crappy”) foam beads, but rather more of a high-density foam akin to what you’d see in a mattress pad.

Using that foam has some distinct advantages. First off, even though the Gigantor sits 40 inches in height from the bottom to the top, once you sit in it, it will surround you almost immediately. The foam conforms to your body very well and makes for a zero-pressure, incredibly-comfortable seating surface. My only gripe is that it’s a bit difficult to sit in an upright position in the Gigantor as there’s upper-back support, but that’s also not really the intention of this bag and there are others from Sumo that are better suited for that.

Once you stand up, unlike a typical (again, “crappy”) bean bag, the Gigantor will puff itself back up nearly to its original shape. While some compression of the foam does happen, it’s minimal. Picking up the bag and fluffing it like a giant pillow will bring the bag back fully to its original size. In the photo above, I had done just that after sitting on it for nearly 5 hours straight.

Two people can sit very comfortably on the Gigantor, with a good amount of room between them and “arm rests” on the side. Three people? Maybe if you’re on the smaller side. For a single person, it’s overkill but it’s beautiful, comfortable and wonderful overkill.

There is a wide variety of sizes and shapes available on the Sumo Lounge site. Anything from ottoman-sized to a version that looks like a gigantic pillow is available and everything is very reasonably priced.

Granted, these still aren’t cheap. The Gigantor will set you back $400. But when you compare it to an equal-sized model from say, Lovesac, it’s a bargain. Lovesac’s $399 price point gets me what they call a “KhakiSac” which is simply a bag without any cover. Add a cover to the shopping cart and you nearly double the price, with a range from $619 to $849 depending on the cover chosen.

Now, let’s go back to the earlier mention of covers and accessories. Sumo Lounge has a variety of covers available, as well as inner liners and even replacement foam. All of these are very reasonably priced and should make life easier in the case of accidents.

In short, I can wholeheartedly recommend the Sumo Lounge Gigantor. Assuming that the rest of the company’s products are built to the same standards as this one (and I have no reason to believe that they’re not) then I’ll be quite happy with the next few things that come my way too. I’m in the market for a couple of their Omni bags (pictured in red, above) and maybe even a couch that coverts into a bed, once it’s available again.

If you have an area in your house that’s just perfect for lounging, then Sumo Lounge gear has to be on your shopping list. If you don’t have an area in your house for a Sumo Lounge bag, maybe you should find one.

There was good news and bad news for Facebook Friday in its social networking battle with . The good news: The newcomer is still struggling with how to handle corporate accounts. The bad news: The established veteran may soon be facing competition on the gaming front.

In what qualifies as good news for Facebook but not so good news for Google Plus, confusion ran rampant over the latter’s policy on corporate pages.

CNET had reported last week that Google product manager Christian Oestlien said the search-engine giant was “accelerating our development plans,” then pulled an about-face and CNET reported early today that testing is being scaled back and corporate accounts were being deleted, with victims including Mashable and “Sesame Street.”

Oestlien said in a post , ironically enough:

With so many qualified candidates expressing intense interest in business profiles, we’ve been thinking hard about how to handle this process. Your enthusiasm obligates us to do more to get businesses involved in Google Plus in the right way, and we have to do it faster. As a result, we have refocused a few priorities, and we expect to have an initial version of businesses profiles up and running for everyone in the next few months. There may be a tiny handful of business profiles that will remain in the meantime solely for the purpose of testing how businesses interact with consumers.

In the mean time, we ask you not to create a business profile using regular profiles on Google Plus. The platform at the moment is not built for the business-use case, and we want to help you build long-term relationships with your customers. Doing it right is worth the wait. We will continue to disable business profiles using regular profiles. We recommend that you find a real person who is willing to represent your organization on Google Plus using a real profile as himself or herself.

TechCrunch took Oestlien’s advice to heart, sort of, creating a Google Plus account for a make-believe new employee named Techathew Cruncherin, which has since been removed by Google. The blog introduced the short-lived Cruncherin as follows:

As per Google’s very, very clear rules, someone has to run it, so we’ve hired someone! Meet Techathew Cruncherin, our newest employee. He’s shy, so you may not see him around much, but he lives here at TechCrunch headquarters. Under a desk. He’s an awesome guy. And he lives for Google Plus. Loves it. Shares the shit out of our TechCrunch posts. It’s awesome.

So, do us (and yourselves) a favor and follow Techathew. He’ll regularly send out our best posts for you to read, comment, and enjoy.

Even before the bogus profile was deleted, TechCrunch was on the war path, posting:

We were explicitly told not to put up a Google Plus profile for TechCrunch at launch, but other brands like Mashable, Search Engine Land, Ford, and Sesame Street didn’t get the memo and had their profile pages suspended (Thursday) morning. Since then, Ford and Mashable have had their Google Plus pages reinstated after what I’m assuming was communication directly with Google. Danny Sullivan, in contrast, will have to file a reconsideration request for Search Engine Land’s page.

Because we had Google social head Vic Gundotra and product manager Bradley Horowitz in the TCTV studio (Thursday), I decided to ask them what they thought about the backlash and inconsistent handling of the Google Plus business accounts. Vic Gundotra’s solution was to choose a figurehead from the organization to represent the brand and deal with the interim months between now and when the Google Plus business pages launch that way. Gundotra told me that in hindsight, the treatment of brands in this way was “probably a mistake.”

Why was the handling of this issue such a big deal to the affected companies? GigaOM presents a good argument:

There is a serious issue underneath the griping, which is that Google can make or break a company’s presence online by virtue of its control over the Web-search market — something Google Plus is almost certain to become an integral part of.

A list of preferred accounts may not have seemed like a big deal when Twitter was just a tiny plaything for nerds, but it became a big benefit when the network grew to become a significant distribution platform for news and other content. The issue for brands is that Google Plus could re-create that problem — or opportunity — in spades, because in just a few weeks it has already become so massive.

Back to Search Engine Land’s Sullivan, who posted on Google Plus:

Hey Google, I’d say I know you’re all new to the social game and should be forgiven that you have messed up with how to handle brands here so badly. Except, you’re not new.

For one, you know that Twitter and Facebook both support brands, and that there would obviously be demand for this here. You failed to implement that support. Bad on you.

I know it’s all “field trial,” but that’s not really an excuse, given that you knew — had to know — this would happen.

Worse, you gave no clue that Google Profiles were suddenly changed to bar non-humans from using them. Before Google Plus came along, this wasn’t a problem. I know. I remember Google Buzz, when plenty of brands, including our own account, started up.

No one said a word against this. No one told us not to do it. So when Google Plus happened, no one had any idea the rules had changed — and especially changed for Google Profiles, which are a superset of Google Plus.

Don’t try to put the genie back in the bottle. Restore the business profiles you have closed. Drop the rule you silently added that blocks business profiles. Let businesses use profiles here just as regular people do. Works just fine on Twitter. Then upgrade those accounts when you’re ready.

If you’re really into doing things right, that’s what you should do. Otherwise, you’re just further doing it wrong.

Now, on to the potentially bad news for Facebook and potentially good news for Google Plus: games. AllThingsD reported that when its platform launches, Google will undercut Facebook and Apple by commanding less than 30 percent of revenues, banking that the more favorable terms will attract developers.

AllThingsD also reported that Google will host the games on its own servers, which could speed loading times and game play.

And CNET offered a roundup of Google games-related news from other sources, including a since-edited mention of a games stream on a Google Plus help page, revealed by SlashGear; the discovery by Engadget of code that mentions game invites and Google Plus Games; and a Google Games logo and source code turned up by TechCrunch.

Readers: Do you think Google Plus should enable brand pages? And would the introduction of games influence your decision on whether or not to join Google Plus?

Slowly rebuilding something as massive as a Google social network is a total pain in the ass. I have requests for invites from friends-of-friends from high school clogging my inbox. And every Google page I turn to: Gmail, Calendar and Google Search has these little pop-up notifications in the top-right corner, beckoning for me to check my Google+ activity.

My willpower has never felt so exhausted. Right now, the process of building Circles are dizzying. But will it be worth it in the long run to sit down and take the time to get it right? Yes. Undoubtedly yes. It’s so obvious people are making Google free commercials saying so. And if you have any reservations, watch this:

Hat tip to for the great find.