Facebook's most recent revisions and user interface adjustments have produced lots of discussion, for and against.
Here is a useful infographic at SodaHead.com that summarizes the key data about who uses Facebook and what other changes are in store.

First off, the results are not a wide cross-section of Facebook users. Instead, SodaHead surveyed its own visitors.

Here are the main points posted on Sodahead, based on their Facebook survey:

It looks like the buzz was justified, because an overwhelming majority of respondents thought Facebook should drop the changes like a bad bowl of clam chowder and bring back the old News Feed -- the News Feed we grew to know and love, where we could exercise our right to choose whether to view top stories or recent stories!

Are you with us? Of course you are. (Most of you, anyway.)

But that's not all we found. We were a little bit curious to see who was leading the charge against algorithmic news feeds -- and dying to know who actually liked them.

We also gave you a broader look at who's on the 'book these days, and took a glimpse at Facebook's new partners-in-crime, Spotify and Netflix.

We found this item interesting over on CNet: The reasons why Facebook's changes are creeping people out.
Writer Dan Reisinger notes that:
"Facebook's updated Open Graph will make the social network far more 'sticky.' Founder Mark Zuckerberg said users will have the ability--thanks to Timeline and a new addition, Ticker--to see what a friend is doing, like watching a movie on Netflix or listening to a song on Spotify, and engage in that same activity from within the social network. The Facebook CEO said he believes the improvements will help create "a completely new class of social apps" that will let users share every single facet of their lives on the social network.
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20110755-17/facebook-changes-creeping-out-some-customers/#ixzz1YoVFtyMr

My new list of 10 state names we ought to have created:
1. Neptunia.
2. Bellissimo.
3. Mirth. (as in state of Mirth...)
4. Chillin. (Where are you? "Chillin.")
5. Nickles.

6. New Ireland (Why not? We have New York.)
7. Bloom County
8. Grace (Obvious...)
9. Sippy. (Next to Mississsippi.)
10. Wellbourne.

Ok, we are that kind of person who worries even if tiny smudges besmirch the shiny Gorilla glass of our Droid, or the fine crystal quality of our iPod Touch.

We've looked at maybe a half dozen screen protectors and have found two we think are worth the price.

In first place, the 3M Natural View Screen Protector. Reasons: easy to install, work pretty much as advertised. Clean and tight to the surface. It's advertised as scratch resistant, and that's almost completely accurate.

Price: $7.99 for the Droid two-pack on Amazon; $14.99 for the iPhone 4 two-back, also on Amazon.

In second: the SGP Steinheil Incredible Series protector. Main web link: http://www.sgpstore.com/cell-phone/motorola.html

The SGP costs more, running about $20 for a two-pack. But it's probably the last real protector your phone or iPod will need. It installs not as easily and simply as the 3M, but it's clarity is sharper than the 3M.

Tons of folks use Craigslist. We just found Craiggers, a pretty useful site that allows you to do a wide or narrow-focused search across several product Craigslist categories. Or across different locations.

Craiggers is at craiggers.com .

It has at least two cool features. It lets you save searches so that you can review choices at a later time. It also lets you view search results without having to leave the Craiggers results page.

Graphic: Molly Quinn, The Spokesman-Review
MollyQ@spokesman.com

After a few weeks of reporting I punched out a lengthy Spokesman.com story on how easy it is for computer forensics folks to hunt down digital evidence and give lawyers ammunition in divorce and family law disputes.

The story which ran on Mother's Day is at this link .

In contrast with my verbosity, graphic artist Molly Quinn helped a good deal by producing a graphic on a sequence that shows how easy someone using EnCase (developed by Guidance Software) can find a deleted online chat and reconstruct the dialogue.

The first paragraphs of the tome:

In 2009, Peter Moesslang, a 68-year-old Spokane-area businessman, was sued by a woman who said she had been his companion for nearly 20 years.

The former companion, Bette Lyn Kelly, filed suit in Spokane County Superior Court, saying she and Moesslang had a steady relationship from the mid-1980s. She said their relationship was meretricious – legally viewed in Washington as similar to a marriage.

Kelly, who’s 64, sued for a portion of Moesslang’s assets, even though she acknowledged they no longer lived together and had broken off the relationship well before 2009.

Moesslang’s attorney, Jane Brown, of Spokane law firm Paine Hamblen LLP, obtained a copy of email files on a computer Kelly used while working for Moesslang. Brown wasn’t sure what they might contain, but like many lawyers Brown now makes that request as standard practice.

Last year a Spokane judge dismissed Kelly’s suit. Some of the emails recovered from her computer – even those thought to be deleted – played a key role in that decision.

Good ol' Tom Sowa, at Spokesman.com, just posted an an audio interview with BigDeal.com CEO Nick Darveau-Garneau.

Darveau-Garneau explains how BigDeal works and how it differs from the dozens of other penny-auction sites across the Web.

The penny-auction web thing has turned out to be very large. BigDeal.com, based in San Francisco, appears to be one of the more serious, straightforward efforts to help shoppers find a good deal.

As Darveau-Garneau says in the interview, the best result will be found by auction fans who know already what they want and know roughly the value of what they want.

The interview is at the OfficeHours blog at Spokesman.com.

A similar price-per-bid site, Swoopo, recently closed its doors. For a post-mortem on Swoopo, here's a story on Techcrunch.

Friendly Computers, a nationwide franchise that's in direct competition with Best Buy's Geek Squad and other tech services firms, will open a Spokane Valley store later this spring.

Friendly Computers (www.friendlycomputers.com)does both remote repairs and in-store jobs.

Here's the recent announcement on their Spokane Valley site: Friendly Computers #202
Contact: James H. Dixson, 328 N. Sullivan Rd. Spokane Valley, WA, 99037;(509) 343-0273

For anyone who's wondered what the old Agilent (formerly Hewlett Packard) site in Liberty Lake looks like, a great chance takes place on Oct. 27.

On that day, from 3 to 8 p.m., LaunchPad Inland NW will host an Emerging Trends in Technology Forum.

The old site is now called the Meadow Wood Technology Center, after Liberty Lake developer Jim Frank bought it from Agilent earlier this year.

The afternoon session will cover several tech topics, according to Bill Kalivas, a co-founder of LaunchPad INW.

At 3 p.m., a panel discussion, featuring Cisco Systems executive Tom Wilburn, will focus on cloud computing.

Wilburn, a Cisco VP for US/Canada Security and Mobility Sales, will deliver a keynote as well, at 4:30 p.m.

LaunchPad membership is not required to attend the event.

You can register and RSVP for $10 per person online, at http://bit.ly/cG7yzm. Tickets will be $20 at the door.

For further information, contact Bill Kalivas, bill@launchpadinw.com.

http://www.spokesman.com/photos/2010/sep/02/112949/

Organizations and companies all across the world are coming to grips with Facebook's two-sided challenge.

Now officially the U.S.'s most popular Web site, Facebook is a helpful tool for workers trying to stay in touch and communicate with customers and constituents.

But what does it do to the workplace and to productivity?

Got any instances where Facebook really helped accomplish a major success in the workplace?

Or do you know of cases where workplace social networking has led to company backlash, in the form of restrictions and site blocking?

I'd like some examples of each, if you have any...

send to: toms@spokesman.com

Maybe the economy is turning up....
This new site, FreeStockCharts.com, is out of beta and offering real-time, streaming, stock charts delivered directly to mobile devices.

Now just about a year old, the site delivers the data to both devices and to any standard PC or Mac browser.

Visually, the site is a flood of numbers.

A company contact said its offerings are roughly a million current stock charts, plus assorted alerts and social networking options for members.

Membership is free; however paid subscribers will see other benefits.

The ComScore 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review -

Thanks to Comscore, here's the company's vast and interesting report on the Digital World 2009.
It has skads of nuggets to chew on: where are all those videos people are watching? What's the size of the smartphone mobile market?

In the past day, the Cyan Worlds team has turned on the Myst Online servers. The Spokane company has twice tried to operate a virtual online version of the Myst world.

The unexpected revival of the 3-D world of Uru (Myst Online) means fans worldwide can revisit and meet others in the environment.

The game most recently was supported as a pay-as-you-play experience hosted by Turner Entertainment and GameTap. GameTap kept it running from 2007 until 2008.

It's been dark ever since, until today.

Rand Miller, CEO of Cyan Worlds, sent a note saying the revival of Uru is not yet meant as a money-making effort.

"We're quietly opening things up on a donation basis - today I think.

We don't have the resources to do anything but just run a server at this point, but it'll be nice to hear footsteps in the cavern again."

Spokane ad firm Magner Sanborn put together the idea for the ad "Moments," which appeared during halftime of Super Bowl 44.

Good work, guys.

Spokane tech company Next IT is justly proud that recruit bot Sgt. Star, an interactive customer-service tool on the GoArmy.com site, has been selected for another, perhaps more dangerous mission.

A press release at the company site, NextIT.com, explains the fast-talking recruiter SS will evolve into a more interactive beast.

NextIT developed the interactive agent and the Army began using it in April 2006.

Within the next few months, the virtual Star will get a Facebook version, allowing the usual give-and-take found on GoArmy.

Mobile users will soon be able to text him.

At some point there will be an "animated" Sgt. Star, or more animated than the version today which sometimes opens a session by rapelling down from a helicopter on your screen.

Now, if you try to jive-talk the good Sgt. on GoArmy, he's programmed to say, "Give me 20, mister."

If a real recruiter's set of responses were built into a better animated version, the result might be an R-rated Web site.

Using Craigslist and Google Maps, one could quickly find the four of five wildest, busiest home-based businesses.

Those two online media fairly accurately show that among Spokane's self-employed, these groups are the largest or most active: Dog trainers/sitters/walkers (see for example, www.lilyslilbuddies.com); handymen or handywomen (just search maps for "handyman Spokane);
painters (do the same drill); and house and home cleaners (see Spokane's The Cleaning Authority http://spokane.thecleaningauthority.com/).

A while back we were sent a link to a cool site, PDFMeNot, which takes a PDF file (the universal Adobe Portable Document File) and strips it down to a cleaner, HTML version.

Here's a cool site, PDFmyURL, which does the opposite.

Take any Web site page and produce a solid, accurate PDF version.

It's cool. Not sure if it's especially useful. But hey, we haven't seen anyone else do this all in one quick swoop.

Calling out to tech heads: If you know anyone who's tech savvy but out of a job, one possible lead is Support.com.

Caveat: We are mentioning, with mild reservations, that the California company is ready to hire 100 men or women to take phone-tech jobs with them.

Salaries are not disclosed in the press materials we received.

Nonetheless, Support.com is a publicly traded company and that alone should help vet their recently launched, nationwide scavenger hunt.

See details below in the jump continuation.

Rick Woodbury, founder and owner of Spokane's Commuter Cars, gets a nice mention in today's New York Times coverage of the Detroit 2010 auto show.

The company makes the sharp, narrow Tango, an electric car also in the running in this year's Progressive Automotive X Prize.

The NYTimes.com story is at http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/12/business/AP-US-Auto-Show-Notebook.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=Tango%20Commuter&st=cse

Some who read the lower post about Comcast now metering one's data use wondered if using Comcast Voice, or any other home VoIP product, would really eat up large gobs of data.
Walt Neary, who works for Comcast on the west side, said it won't.

Here are Walt's comments shipped by e-mail:

The streaming data in VoIP calls just doesn't use that much bandwidth on a relative scale. We're quite serious that the 250(GB limit) is only going to affect a very, very small group of people.

The folks I talked with are leery about providing numbers publicly because Vonage or Skype might have slightly different numbers, or you might talk with someone who is/says they are a VoIP expert and have different numbers.

I'm not sure there's any standard for expressing how much bandwidth VoIP uses.

After many, many months, I'd say again, the factors that affect notice for excessive use are what I listed originally, vastly unusual amounts of downloading, a virus, etc...

Comcast has released its official data-use meter for its Spokane high speed Internet customers. Users can start seeing how close to a data hog they are, effective today (Jan. 12).

All of this comes from the Web dust-up of about 16 months ago, when Comcast had to admit they were throttling bandwidth on high-volume users.

Eventually Comcast, the country's larget cable company, established and publicized its maximum use data limit: a very HUGE 250 GBs per month.

To use the free usage monitor go here:
http://customer.comcast.com

Then click on the "Users and Settings" tab and look for the "View details" in the "My devices" section (located toward the upper right hand of the screen) that will take you to the data usage details page.

The meter will first show usage in the current month.

It's not a download; it dynamically reads the usage over your home or business network, though it is not always real-time.

Spokane is the second market that Comcast rolled out the service. Portland was the first.

We noticed this blog's list of the ten best U.S. electric cars, and its inclusion of the Tango, the great two-seater developed by Rick Woodbury of Commuter Cars.
Lucky Earth is the blog:
www.luckyearth.com/blog/top-10-coolest-electric-cars/

Woodbury is working on making the Tango ready for competition in the global Automotive Xprize, starting later this year. He's entered into the alternate two-seater category. For more info, go to http://www.progressiveautoxprize.org/

Developments have been stealthy and under cover at Cyan Worlds.

Following on the success of the Myst app, the team has been working on the successor, Riven for iPhone, said company President Tony Fryman.

We'll try to nail down, soon, when it's expected.
We're also asking Cyan for comments on other topics, one of them being if versions of the games will land on the other mobile platforms, such as Android, Blackberry and Palm.

Since we're calling out ARO Design's Bugfarm app, it's time to also think about other buggy software.

CNET posted this overview of the year's least safe software, and the list shows a similar pattern, with firms like Mozilla and Adobe dealing with the most frequent instances of patches and upgrades.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10417785-245.html?tag=nl.e404

Spokane's very versatile software company ARO Designs Inc.( www.arodesigns.com) has just had its iPhone game app "BugFarm" approved on the iTunes store.

Company co-founder Michael Sheets sent the following release:

Apple has released “Bugfarm Mobile,” the first iPhone software to result from a joint venture between ARO Designs, Inc. of Spokane and Sterling International, Inc. of Spokane Valley.

Sheets describes the new program as "a fast-paced, casual game, ideal to play while waiting in lines or between 'phone calls. It's also somewhat addictive."

A free demo and the full version are available now through iTunes or downloadable directly from Apple's App Store.