I just cant keep up with the facebook design changes anymore.

But it is kind of cool.

Today was Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft.  That simple statement of fact is really pretty incredible.  I realize that they are very different in what they did, but I cannot help but think of this as being similar to when Washington left the White House.  One cast off tyranny , bringing freedom to a new nation and was rewarded with the faith of an entire nation so strong that he could have remained in power until his death.  But instead he walked away and voluntarily passed the mantle of freedom to the next generation, an unprecedented act in the modern history of the time.

Gates built an empire out of literally nothing.  Though everyone may have their own criticisms of Microsoft, myself included, if it were not for Gates’ tireless pursuit of technology, such a wide adoption of computing would not have taken place so rapidly.  Regardless, he now sits at the helm of the most powerful software and computing behemoth in the world and rather than spend his days presiding over his realm in the manner of Sumner Redstone, Rupert Murdoch or Warren Buffet, he is casting it off in the pursuit of cures and enlightenment.  He will still have quite a bit of pull over in Redmond and will remain on the Board of Directors, but walking away from the control of an empire is no small feat and should never be taken lightly by the public.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the most wealthy and most promising organization of its kind that this world has ever seen.  Hopefully the Gates family can devote the same relentless energy into this venture as Bill did in his company.  I believe we will see only amazing things in the future from their investment in humanity.  It may seem like I am being dramatic about all of this, but think about it for a moment. Could YOU really walk away from his position?

All in all, g’bye Bill. Thanks for the breakthroughs and the advancements…and I really hope to see more of them in the future.

Notice that Apple says "Hey, we are going to launch the next generation of awesomeness on July 11th." And apparently the editors across the sea heard "Sup Aussies, we are giving you a special release…prepare to get rocked tomorrow." (At first I thought that they even screwed that up since today is the 9th, but I think that across the international date line, it is either today, tonight, tomorrow or yesterday already. I choose not to understand time zones.)

So anyway, the news story was this:

The only explanation I can come up with is the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica threw the entire Australian continent into a time shift placing it a month in the future. Or they are just wrong and forgot to actually read the press release. I wonder how many people will show up to apple stores tomorrow demanding the latest and greatest wonderment designed by the gods.

Not only that, but I have every email I’ve gotten since the day I signed up for Gmail archived in my account (I have all other email addresses forwarded to my Gmail solely for this purpose) so that is about three and a half years of information I have socked away…  And I can imagine that if your entire business ran via email or you have important business info or data stored on email the tangible effects of losing it would be even more real.  So I wonder, how much people really think their email accounts are worth because I would value mine far higher than $50…and if mine had gotten deleted, I would have a few words for Charter…

from www.youtube.com

As it was announced on Tuesday, Google had a lineup of nine rather lackluster parters on board for the launch: Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.  While the idea is amazing, it left many people wondering if it had any chance of success since everyone is on Myspace and facebook…how many people do you know on Hi5?  But today, the rumors became official and the stars aligned, bringing some real weight to the new OpenSocial platform.  MySpace, NewsGator, Bebo, and SixApart are now confirmed as a partners on the platform.

This is huge news: not only is MySpace the largest social network but Bebo brings in quite a few young professionals who are ‘too old’ for facebook but ‘too cool’ for MySpace, NewsGator brings the cross-platform information aggregation, and SixApart includes TypePad, LiveJournal, Vox, and MovableType.  This officially closes the gap between blogging, content hosting, and social networking.  This is the Holy Trinity of user-generated social media.  I am a diehard facebook user, but I have to say, they made a mistake walking away from this deal: they are the only major player not on board and i think it is going to cost them in the long-run.  This is the Open Social Graph that has been so long sought after and theorized by all of us ‘web 2.0′ people.

It sounds sort of like I am spreading the gospel, but I have a feeling that this is going to revolutionize the networking world.  Good job on Google’s part, releasing the dud list and letting it get kicked around for awhile before they let the cat out of the bag on the big guns!  Kind of like the nerd at school who lets the bullies push him around for a bit before he lets loose some intricate plan to get the upper hand.

Google has set itself up for a huge success and a massive push to diversify its business sources…now it just has to pull it off.

 UPDATE: (11/1 9:06pm)  Maybe facebook wasn’t courted for OpenSocial?  The jury is still out…

This is a screenshot of the old site design I tracked down via Google Image Search:

And this is my screenshot of the new design that I think has launched sometime this afternoon

I love the new site design which has also carried over into the facebook application and a bit into the default user pages…kudos to Twitter for getting dressed up for the adult table! The new design makes the site looks sophisticated while still looking fun and easy…it’s about time! Whats is up next? Finally a desktop client developed by twitter?

UPDATE: (11/1 9:35am)  Okay, so apparently I forgot that yesterday was Halloween.  The dark background on Twitter was a holiday change, not a permanent one: the site is back to blue today…although, I will say that I like the black a lot better!  The new homepage design is still in place and I still think it is a huge step forward in making the site more apt for public consumption.  I also really like how the reviews at the bottom of the page are designed like tweets!

This shield is long overdue and is already in place in 30 states, but this will cover federal  investigations rather than just state-level.  However, the Bush administration sees this as a ‘get out of jail free’ card for leaking government secrets…sounds like a valid concern at first, but I bet they would have loved a shield law a few years ago so they could  have avoided the whole Scooter Libby mess.  It’s about time we started making shields that work rather than throwing our money into a black hole for a test that is considered successful if it gets within a mile of the target.

Basically, some photographer took a picture of Ashton Kutcher and someone linked to it in a comment left on TechCrunch. Apparently, the photographer and her little crony thought this was worthy of $150,000 settlement or else they would sue for $1.5 million! This guy who claims to be representing the photographer calls the site ‘TechCrotch’ and quickly shows that he has absolutely no idea how the internet works!

Anyway, check out the first post by Michael Arrington and the hilarious updates that followed from both sides…today there was an updated post with an apology letter from the instigator, in which he admits that he has no idea how to work the internet.

This is all really hilarious if you read through it, but I doubt it is unique…I’d be interested to see some of the crackpot threats that massive companies like Apple and Microsoft get!

• Steve Forbes is predicting that the 2008 presidential election will consist of Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, and Michael Bloomberg.

• MySpace has hit 200 million users. This is big news…that is more people than the individual population of every country in the world except Indonesia, the United States, India, and China. I couldn’t find any verification of this outside of Mashable, but it seems to be on par with their historical growth pattern.

• Tila Tequila is getting her own show on MTV…nevermind the content: the underlying breakthrough here is that she got famous because of MySpace. She was a not-so-famous Playboy model until she was one of the first few hundred thousand people on MySpace and she posted a few scandalous pictures and invited a few thousand people to the site. According to Time, she gave the site the kick it needed to jump from obscurity to the ‘cool kids’ table’…and now she has over 2 million ‘friends’ on the site and markets her music to them, and sells it exclusive on iTunes. This makes her the first person ever to rise from total obscurity and establish a multimedia ‘empire’ via social networking tools. This is a big deal…but the only story that will be in the news is the show’s content.

• Facebook has finally gotten to making the application login page more user-friendly and less buggy by transforming it into an AJAX popup window: apprently this isnt widely launched yet, but it is coming down the pipeline.

Update: Altered formatting to make it more ‘list-like’ -ac