Facebook launched Facebook Ads in November 2007 to give brands and businesses a way to create a presence on Facebook and interact with users. Starting next week, says a source with knowledge of the new product, those pages will be substantially redesigned.

Today there are countless pages (example) that highlight brands. These pages are free to set up, and the Facebook sales team then encourages those brands to buy Facebook ads that point back to the pages. The brands get users who become fans of the page and maybe leave a wall comment. Facebook gets ad dollars, and users never leave the Facebook site.

Those pages include standard Facebook features like a Wall for user comments, a News Feed showing changes and updates to the page, and places for photos and videos to be uploaded. Many advertisers also spend a great deal of money customize the page with applications and widgets showing off various products as well.

Look for a much more streamlined look to Facebook Pages next week though, with a multitab interface very similar to what Facebook launched to users in 2008. The default view will show the Wall (which may include negative comments unless they are routinely deleted). All the custom apps will be pushed to a second Boxes tab. The Pages will also likely mirror the look of normal user profiles, with an image in the top left corner, etc.

The Facebook sales team is soft selling the concept to advertisers now, some of whom aren’t pleased with the changes, we’ve heard. Many of these advertisers have spent significant money designing the pages, and lots more on top advertising the Pages through Facebook. Now the Pages will be changed. Users may love the changes and interact more with the pages. Or they may not. As usual with changes at Facebook, people (in this case advertisers) will scream bloody murder, and then likely settle down.

If this post on a local blog about Brooklyn has it right, the NY Times will be debuting a neighborhood blog project next week on Monday. Here’s the gist:

Look out, local bloggers, the Gray Lady is moving in on your turf. Starting next week, The New York Times will be rolling out a neighborhood blog initiative starting mid-day on Monday. Our home soil of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill will be one of the two pilot sites (the other site will cover Millburn, Maplewood and South Orange in New Jersey). According to an email that was forwarded to us, the subject matter will include “cultural events, bar and restaurant openings, real estate, arts, fashion, health, social concerns and anything else that goes on in the ‘SoHo of Brooklyn.’”

Still according to the blog, the local blog network will be filled with content from the paper’s editors (one for each site) but also rely partially on citizen journalism i.e. unpaid contributions from locals readers who will be able to post everything from short video clips to wedding announcements. Apparently, the network will also feature a map-based real-estate listings section will tie back to the NY Times’ main real-estate site.

Read more @ TechCrunch

The famous Dunbar number, or “theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships”, is generally accepted to be about 150. However, in a recent interview with The Economist, Cameron Marlow, a research scientist at Facebook, shared some interesting stats on Facebook users’ social behavior patterns.

His findings: while many people have hundreds friends on Facebook, they still only actively communicate with a small few. Or to quote the author of the article, “Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.”

Here’s the data from Marlow:

The average male Facebook user with 120 friends:

• Leaves comments on 7 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 4 friends

The average female Facebook user with 120 friends:

• Leaves comments on 10 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 6 friends

The average male Facebook user with 500 friends:

• Leaves comments on 17 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 10 friends

The average female Facebook user with 500 friends:

• Leaves comments on 26 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 16 friends

In other words, Facebook users comment on stuff from only about 5-10% of their Facebook friends. And as has been shown by many other studies, women communicate with more people in all cases than men.

“People who are members of online social networks are not so much ‘networking’ as they are ‘broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,’” Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, says.

Microsoft Corp. may begin shipping its Windows 7 operating system as early as the third quarter, months before the software maker’s official prediction, a computer-industry executive said.

“According to current planning, it should be late September or early October,” said Ray Chen, president of Taipei-based Compal Electronics Inc.，the maker of laptop personal computers for Hewlett-Packard Co. and Acer Inc.

Windows 7, Microsoft’s first operating system since the general release of Vista in January 2007, may help spur sales of PCs amid the global recession, Chen said. Worldwide notebook shipments this year will be little changed from 2008 at 120 million to 125 million units, he told an investors’ conference at the company’s headquarters today.

“Windows 7 has much better performance than Windows Vista,” said Daniel Chang, a computer-industry analyst at Macquarie Securities Ltd. in Taipei. “The reviews have been excellent and there’s been real improvement in the user interface.”

Microsoft dropped 21 cents, or 1.2 percent, to $16.96 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have declined 39 percent in the past year.

Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, has been officially saying the new system will be released about three years after Windows Vista went on sale, or January 2010. Amelia Agrawal, a spokeswoman in Singapore for Redmond, Washington- based Microsoft, repeated that statement today.

Read more @ Bloomberg

The world’s top mobile phone maker Nokia is eyeing entering the laptop business, its Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said in an interview to Finnish national broadcaster YLE on Wednesday.

“We are looking very actively also at this opportunity,” Kallasvuo said, when asked whether Nokia plans to make laptops.

Industry has rumored about Nokia’s possible plan to enter the PC industry since late last year, but Kallasvuo’s comment was the first official admittance of such plans.

“We don’t have to look even for five years from now to see that what we know as a mobile phone and what we know as a PC are in many ways converging,” Kallasvuo said.

“Today we have hundreds of millions of people who are having their first Internet experience on the phone. This is a good indication,” he said.

Nokia’s comments come a week after No 3 PC brand Acer launched a foray into the phone business with eight mobile phone models, joining leader Hewlett-Packard and No. 4 Lenovo in the high-growth space.

While strong profit margins in the smartphone industry attract PC brands, the attraction of the low-margin computer industry is less obvious.

“Nokia maybe nervous about entering a market segment that is already heavily commoditized, but it would be in a position to exploit its enormous scale in manufacturing, supply chain and distribution,” said Ben Wood, research director at CCS Insight.

Read more @ Reuters

This week we are announcing that Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 has hit an important milestone in development: Release Candidate (RC). 

Starting today, the RC of SP2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 will be available to TechNet and MSDN subscribers to test prior to final release. In the very near future, we will be making the RC broadly available for anyone to download and test. You can expect another blog post from me when that happens.

SP2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 include updates that have been delivered since the release of SP1, as well as support for new types of hardware and emerging standards. As we’ve described since we first talked about SP2, we’ve taken your feedback into account when developing SP2. Specifically, we expect SP2 to continue the security benefits of both products and simplify deployment for our customers.

For an outline of changes in SP2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, check out the notable changes document.

We are planning to release SP2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 in the second quarter of 2009.

Source: Windows Team Blog

CUPERTINO, California—February 24, 2009—Apple® today announced the public beta of Safari® 4, the world’s fastest and most innovative web browser for Mac® and Windows PCs. The Nitro engine in Safari 4 runs JavaScript 4.2 times faster than Safari 3.* Innovative new features that make browsing more intuitive and enjoyable include Top Sites, for a stunning visual preview of frequently visited pages; Full History Search, to search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages; Cover Flow®, to easily flip through web history or bookmarks; and Tabs on Top, to make tabbed browsing easier and more intuitive.

“Apple created Safari to bring innovation, speed and open standards back into web browsers, and today it takes another big step forward,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Safari 4 is the fastest and most efficient browser for Mac and Windows, with great integration of HTML 5 and CSS 3 web standards that enables the next generation of interactive web applications.”

Safari 4 is built on the world’s most advanced browser technologies including the new Nitro JavaScript engine that executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than IE 7 and more than three times faster than Firefox 3. Safari quickly loads HTML web pages three times faster than IE 7 and almost three times faster than Firefox 3.*

Apple is leading the industry in defining and implementing innovative web standards such as HTML 5 and CSS 3 for an entirely new class of web applications that feature rich media, graphics and fonts. Safari 4 includes HTML 5 support for offline technologies so web-based applications can store information locally without an Internet connection, and is the first browser to support advanced CSS Effects that enable highly polished web graphics using reflections, gradients and precision masks. Safari 4 is the first browser to pass the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 test, which examines how well a browser adheres to CSS, JavaScript, XML and SVG web standards that are specifically designed for dynamic web applications.

Read more @ Apple Inc

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced on a posting on the ubuntu-devel-announce list Friday. As usual, efforts surrounding the Linux distribution are divided between two target deployments, desktop and server. The desktop goals are primarily around “first impressions,” with Shuttleworth indicating that “boot will be beautiful.” He also promises that the appearance of Ubuntu will change significantly:

The desktop will have a designer’s fingerprints all over it - we’re now beginning the serious push to a new look. Brown has served us well but the Koala is considering other options.

I am sure others here at CNET will give the desktop portions of the announcement the serious treatment it deserves, but the server functionality that Shuttleworth announced is much more interesting to the cloud-computing community.

It sounds like the majority of the work on the server side in Karmic Koala will be around cloud computing. Here is the entire text of that portion of the announcement:

A good Koala knows how to see the wood for the trees, even when her head is in the clouds. Ubuntu aims to keep free software at the forefront of cloud computing by embracing the API’s of Amazon EC2, and making it easy for anybody to setup their own cloud using entirely open tools. We’re currently in beta with official Ubuntu base AMI’s for use on Amazon EC2. During the Karmic cycle we want to make it easy to deploy applications into the cloud, with ready-to-run appliances or by quickly assembling a custom image. Ubuntu-vmbuilder makes it easy to create a custom AMI today, but a portfolio of standard image profiles will allow easier collaboration between people doing similar things on EC2. Wouldn’t it be apt for Ubuntu to make the Amazon jungle as easy to navigate as, say, APT?

What if you want to build an EC2-style cloud of your own? Of all the trees in the wood, a Koala’s favorite leaf is Eucalyptus. The Eucalyptus project, from UCSB, enables you to create an EC2-style cloud in your own data center, on your own hardware. It’s no coincidence that Eucalyptus has just been uploaded to universe and will be part of Jaunty - during the Karmic cycle we expect to make those clouds dance, with dynamically growing and shrinking resource allocations depending on your needs. A savvy Koala knows that the best way to conserve energy is to go to sleep, and these days even servers can suspend and resume, so imagine if we could make it possible to build a cloud computing facility that drops its energy use virtually to zero by napping in the midday heat, and waking up when there’s work to be done. No need to drink at the energy fountain when there’s nothing going on. If we get all of this right, our Koala will help take the edge off the bear market.

If that sounds rather open and nebulous, then we’ve hit the sweet spot for cloud computing futurology. Let me invite you to join the server team at UDS in Barcelona, when they’ll be defining the exact set of features to ship in October.

In case you missed that, let me break it down:

• Ubuntu server will target promoting cloud computing through entirely open-source software.

• For those wishing to manage clouds, Ubuntu will apparently contain tools that leverage the Amazon APIs. (I would hope the GoGrid APIs are also under consideration, considering its apparent consideration by a variety of Amazon’s competitors.)

• Canonical will create standard Amazon Machine Images from Karmic Koala, essentially creating “ready-to-run” appliances that will serve as “standard builds” to the Amazon community.

• Don’t want to commit to Amazon? Would you rather build a cloud on your own infrastructure to get a feel for things while the public clouds “cure”? Starting with Karmic’s predecessor, Jaunty Jaguar Jackalope (soon to go to code freeze), UC Santa Barbara’s open-source cloud project, Eucalyptus, will be included in every install package.

Read more @ Cnet

As the first week of the trial came to an end, hundreds of supporters gathered Friday evening for a Spectrial Kopimi Party at a night club in central Stockholm. The party was thrown by the Swedish Pirate Bureau and saw live performances by several artists, a DJ set from Brokep and video art made from the movies featured in the trial.

It has been a long and exhausting week for all participants of the spectrial. To end it in style, Pirate Bureau threw a party last night, which turned out to be a huge success. Tickets were sold out just an hour after they started selling, and as the party got underway the optimistic kopimistic atmosphere among the participants couldn’t be mistaken.

“Right now, society is developing at a fantastic pace. That is immensely wonderful and everyone involved is having fun. Let us try and make it a good development,” said Johan Allgoth of the Pirate Bureau.

The cheerful spirit was not only due to the events in the first week of the trial (where the prosecution repeatedly failed to present any evidence) but also down to a supply of free champagne for all pirates in attendance.

“The Pirate Bureau operated for many years without economic resources and that was a very good way for us to work. Lately, we’ve had some money coming into the organization and we needed to put it to good use. Buying champagne for great people is definitely a good way to channel our resources, paying the poor artist another way,” Johan Allgoth told us.
Free Champagne for all the pirates

The Pirate Bureau has had a busy week in Stockholm, doing their part in the performance of the Spectrial theater. Their headquarters have been located in the S23K bus, parked outside the court. From the bus they created audio visual art, published op-eds and streamed impromptu parties with everyone welcome to participate.

Read more @ TorrentFreak