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I just read Ellen McGirt's poignant feature story on "The Brand Called Obama" in Fast Company, and my marketing head is spinning. "The fact that Obama has taken what we thought we knew about politics and turned it into a different game for a different generation is no longer news," she writes, "but what has hardly been examined is the degree to which his success indicates a seismic shift on the business horizon as well." Indeed, Obama has introduced a new brand of politics, and he has caused a paradigm shift that goes … Read more

Mark Zuckerberg describes Facebook as a service designed to help people communicate better, primarily through the social graph, which is the network of connections and relationships between people.

The social graph, he said, is the reason Facebook works. The popular social applications, such as Flirtable, FunWall and SuperPoke, built on the Facebook platform, are only a small part of Facebook's bigger ambition to help people communicate better.

In fact, Facebook is on a collision course with the more mature Web colonies--AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

One of the key metrics of a major portal is stickiness--the number of applications … Read more

Facebook launched a bunch of new privacy controls today, and has received a significant amount of positive press as a result. The praise is perhaps not so deserving--as the new privacy controls can be easily evaded.

The new privacy settings allow users to customize which friends can view specific details in their own profile. Users can lock down specific bits of information to their friends, friends of friends, or even particular individuals.

There is, however, a significant design flaw present in this new feature. Facebook users can select which types of strangers can view their profile. That is, a student … Read more

The miniaturization of matter has long been a human desire, and viewing the world from a smaller perspective is the core of many novels and movies. The idea of shrinking people for the purpose of traveling inside another human's body, in particular, has been frequently used in animated cartoons, including The Simpsons, Futurama, Beetlejuice, and SpongeBob SquarePants.

One of the most entertaining pieces in this genre is Fantastic Voyage, a science-fiction movie from 1966, which -- albeit not free of some severe logical flaws -- has lost none of its original appeal. Fantastic Voyage tells the story of a … Read more

This week on the EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss Yahoo's latest move to get Microsoft to cough up more cash for the company. We also talk about Facebook's new privacy options and chat service, which puts the social-networking upstart on a trajectory to collide with Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and others who offer complete communications services.

In addition, we chat about Intel's plans to produce six-core chips in the fourth quarter, and Apple's massive security update to its operating system.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--When up-and-comer Facebook opened up its developer platform last May, it had a trickle-down effect for the Web's largest auction house.

"Thanks to Facebook, everybody wants to develop applications for platforms," Max Mancini, eBay's senior director of platform and disruptive innovation, said here Tuesday at the Dow Jones Web Ventures conference.

Mancini said although eBay has offered developers a platform for creating specialized eBay applications for the last six-plus years, Facebook popularized the concept in the Web community. In fact, five or six other developers beat eBay to the punch by building a … Read more

CNET News.com's Dan Farber co-wrote this report.

Social network Facebook will roll out more extensive privacy controls Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, as well as an instant-messaging service soon after, representatives from the company announced during a press briefing at the company's headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.

Most notable about the new privacy controls is the fact that Facebook members will now be able to choose how much of their profiles is visible to those on their friends list.

Naomi Gleit, Facebook's product manager for privacy and internationalization, previewed the updated options, which include a new &… Read more

On Friday, a rumor surfaced that Facebook would be launching an internal instant-messaging service . Then, on Saturday, gossip blog Valleywag suggested that launching the IM service would involve acquiring Social.IM, a Facebook application that enables instant message chat between services like AIM, Yahoo, and Windows Live Messenger. A Social.IM exec coyly told Valleywag, "If we're being bought, I haven't gotten the call yet."

Social.IM is supported by venture backing from Valley icon Peter Thiel, who also has invested in Facebook.

One thing Valleywag didn't note is that in response to the rumor … Read more

Facebook plans to launch an instant-messaging application for members to embed on their profiles as early as next week, TechCrunch reported Friday.

Details are sketchy, but it appears that this will be a Web-based IM service that would allow Facebook users to chat with other people on their friends lists without needing to go through a third-party program. Additionally, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington detailed, the service would likely be based on the Jabber open-source platform, which would mean that third-party "universal IM" clients like Pidgin, Trillian, and Adium would be able to implement it.

Facebook representatives were not … Read more