Yesterday a select group of fifteen or so industry luminaries attended a highly confidential meeting at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View to discuss the company’s upcoming plans to address the “Facebook issue.” The meeting was so secret that all attendees had to sign…

And it's starting to happen right now, today in fact. I reported earlier on a new feed in Facebook, allowing notifications to be visible outside the wall.It's getting reallll interesting -- I've found some more RSS feeds in Facebook's UI. 1. Friends Status Updates. Look for the subscription link in…

There’s a war being fought over ownership of your identity. Today Netvibes launches the Facebook Widget, which lets you view your Facebook notifications and friends within Netvibes. Data displayed includes links to your profile, friends and networks, and the usual counters for the number of…

We've got social networks with lots of users, like MySpace, Beebo, Facebook, etc, and we've got open social networks like Marc Canter's People Aggregator and Marc Andreessen's Ning. But we really don't yet have an open social network with a lot of users. Facebook took a step in that direction when…

Amazing piece on Mashable, finally the issues we've been writing about here for 10-plus years are starting to surface in dramatic terms in the commercial space. To all vendors who are tuned in, look for ways you're keeping your users from managing their own data. The users are getting educated,…

Today I'm waking up with the Smashing Pumpkins ringing in my ears and my ego search ringing off the hook. My throat and head are about 60-70% healed and looking back on my last couple of posts about turning off comments and declaring Facebook bankruptcy and asking: was my physical…

Forget Facebook. We're placing an open call to the web programming community to create a new social networking framework based on open standards.

Today I'm declaring Facebook Bankruptcy in addition to comment bankruptcy.I can't keep up with the friend requests, the requests to confirm how we know each other, the requests to tell you I like you, the requests to tell you I want your to tell me what movies you want to tell me about, etc.I've got…

So Jason “no comments” Calacanis answers me, and others, back about his increasing dislike of Facebook and other social networks.First of all, for the record, Jason is right. Facebook sucks. Twitter sucks. Pownce sucks. Jaiku sucks. Kyte sucks. Etc and etc.Why? Because they take time.But…

This was Facebook Week here at Read/WriteWeb, but I couldn't help but notice how many other blogs wrote posts about Facebook this week as well. It seemed that almost every day there was a Facebook meme on Techmeme. Anecdotal evidence would seem to suggest that Facebook is the most hyped thing this…

How social networks handle multiple social contexts (e.g. my work life versus my personal life) has been on my mind this week. Today I was in a meeting where someone mentioned that most of the people he knows have profiles on both MySpace and Facebook because their real friends are on MySpace while…

I read Kottke's post and his follow-up last week and the question he asks has been ratting around in my brain ever since. Is Facebook the new AOL?I've been debating his posts in private with a number of people and one of them, Jarid Lukin, the creator of the word freemium among other things, said…

There's been a debate raging on Techmeme, the website that turns the tech blogosphere into a mail list, about the value of Facebook.I have two answers to the question: 1. A lot. 2. Or very little. Depending on what they do.The next evolution of the web is to deconstruct social networks into their…