Now in the age of everything-on-the-Web, that information is usually obscured by multiple listings, and then once you find the right listing it’s often inaccurate or outdated. Local businesses open and close and expand so quickly that it’s difficult to keep track, and any two sites listing information on a given business can contradict each other.

A start-up called Yext is out to fix that with a service it calls PowerListings Turbo. The basic idea is this. Say you’re a sandwich shop in the West Village that wants to get listed on Yelp and HopStop and Yahoo and Superpages and a handful of other sites where hungry customers might be looking for you. You send your info to Yext, including photos and maybe an opening special, and Yext gets your listing on all those sites.

Now fast forward a few months. Say a better location opens up a block away and you jump at the chance to move because it’s closer to the subway stop. You move. All that listing info is out of date. Don’t worry. Send Yext the updated info including the new address and within minutes all the listings on all those other sites get updated, too.

CEO Howard Lerman demonstrated it for me last week and said that one in every five searches for business information returns inaccurate data. And the problem gets only further compounded when you’re a big company with hundreds or thousands of locations. Update a location once with Yext and it’s taken care of within minutes across whatever other sites it may be listed on.

Yext works with 36 different sites that host business information and so far is the platform behind 35,000 different listings. The New York-based company has been around since 2006 and has investments from Sutter Hill Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners and WGI Investments, and has raised about $39 million in four rounds.

Here’s some electric weekend reading for those interested in the push and pull between venture investors and start-ups in the frothy Web 2.0 environment.

In an email to Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky (which I obtained, embedded below), former Facebook exec Chamath Palihapitiya, who now runs an investment fund called the Social+Capital Partnership, is passing on participating in the recent $112 million round for the hot online rental site that was announced in July.

The deal — which values the company at $1.2 billion — has not officially closed yet, but includes venture firms such as DST Global, Andreessen Horowitz and others. Previous investors include Sequoia Capital.

Palihapitiya confirmed to me that it was his email and that his possible investment in Airbnb was small.

That said, his concerns center on how much voting control of new investors’ preferred shares the founders have in the latest round and also a $22.5 million cashing out, $21 million of which is going to those founders.

Another $9.6 million is being used to buy secondary stock from current Airbnb shareholders, who have to render parts of their vested stakes for the money.

Such wrangling between investors and entrepreneurs is not uncommon in Silicon Valley these days, as ever-dumber money chases ever-more-powerful geeks. But Palihapitiya’s email is a smart, reasonable and well-written argument to stop the madness.

According to sources close to Airbnb, the numbers that he refers to below are accurate, as is what appears to be an unusual level of voting control by its founders. Presumably, it is to protect the company from possible future sales on the secondary markets and to keep control with its founders as the number of investors grows.

In any case, the Palihapitiya email to Chesky is well worth the read (I have removed email addresses as a courtesy):

From: Chamath Palihapitiya
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2011 11:16:05 -0700

To: Brian Chesky

Subject: Airbnb financing…

Brian,

Cc Marc, Reid, my deal team

Thanks again for giving me the chance to participate in your latest financing. I had a chance to review the docs at length yesterday and I wanted to follow up as, quite honestly, I’ve never seen a deal like this over ~60 investments I’ve done and I’m pretty concerned.

I’m all for getting the best valuation you can, minimizing dilution and maximizing control. We did this brilliantly at Facebook…all of our financings (except our first $$$ from Peter Thiel) were done not out of necessity but opportunity. As such, our investors had virtually no control and it resulted in a much better outcome. As we’ve discussed, I generally don’t believe investors add much to a success story and so minimizing their impact is a great strategy when you are onto something that is working.

This said, while several of these concepts are reflected in the current deal, there is one big thing that I am fundamentally against and violates my principles and will prevent me from participating in your round. When I saw that you guys were taking $31M out of the company, I didn’t think much of it as I just assumed it would entirely be via a secondary sale.

But as I understand the deal, it seems that you are doing only $9.6M in secondary and $22.5M as a dividend to common (of which $21M goes to you and your co-founders). I am really uncomfortable with this and don’t think its in the spirit of building a good, long term business. Effectively, it is a strategy that allows you guys to take money out of the business and not dilute yourself — I’m not sure why this is such a big deal when you guys are almost 90% vested and the financing is at $1.2B where your dilution is marginal. Further, it excludes many of the employees that probably have helped you and your co–founders get the company to this place as most of these folks probably don’t have any stock but have unexercised stock options and thus won’t get a dividend.

My basic principle on this stuff is that if you want liquidity, that’s fine, but you should make it available to everyone. Otherwise, no one should get it. Your current deal is the farthest away from this principle that I’ve seen in a while…this strategy has been done once before — at Groupon. We can see how “well” they are doing and how short term the investor community is now viewing their motives. I really think you can do better than this…and that you are better than this.

Separately, when you look at successful tech companies, it seems that dividends are an approach used by cash rich operations to distribute excess earnings — in fact, the most successful, cash rich tech company in the world, Apple, hasn’t issued a dividend and they have more than $75B in cash! Again, while I think Airbnb will be a good company, this is nowhere near the truth now — you guys still need to scale and build this thing for the future.

I really think you are onto something but I would implore you to not take the easy way out. Treat your employees the same as you’d treat yourself. Do things that you will be proud of and can defend to anyone including your Board, employees, prospective hires etc. In such a competitive hiring market, you are competing with not just your obvious competitors, but also any successful tech company who is also looking for great talent. A principle that treats your employees as well as you’d treat yourself is a huge strategy for differentiation, retention and long term happiness of the exact types of people you will need to be successful. In contrast, if you are viewed as self-dealing and shady, it will only hurt your long term prospects…

In summary, I’m passing on this financing because I strongly disagree with what’s going on. I’m not sure who advocated this approach but I did mention this to Reid [Hoffman, another Airbnb investor via Greylock Partners] last night and he was of a similar mind to myself and surprised this was the approach being taken. If you want some good advice — I would ask that you consider pinging him about different ways to think about going about the liquidity portion.

If you change your mind on how to close this financing, let me know and I’d love to reconsider. Otherwise, good luck and lets keep in touch.

Take care,

Chamath

I’ll be starting a two-year assignment with the Peace Corps in the near future. I would like to start a blog where I can record my daily activities for my friends and family to read. Do you have any suggestions?

A:

There are numerous free blogging services that offer templates, simple tools and a free address your friends and family can use to view your reports. Two that I have used and can suggest are Blogger, owned by Google, at blogger.com; and the independent WordPress, at wordpress.com.

Q:

In terms of battery life, does it make any practical difference if I leave my common programs on my MacBook Pro running when dormant versus shutting them down when I’m not using them and then firing them up as needed?

A:

I asked Apple about this, and the company said an open, but idle, application on a Mac notebook generally won’t use any or many processor resources, which means almost no impact on battery life, even if it performs periodic background actions like fetching mail.

Exceptions would be programs that do heavy-duty things in the background, like rendering videos. The company strongly advises making sure the laptop is in sleep mode when not in use, and keeping the screen at the lowest brightness level that works for you.

Also, you can check how much demand a program is placing on the processor by running the Activity Monitor, located in the Utilities folder in Applications.

Q:

Why would a GSM phone run in 3G-mode only on AT&T and not on T-Mobile?

A:

It’s true that both carriers use the same basic technology, called GSM. But, in some cases, phones (like the AT&T iPhone) are locked so that, unless you do serious hacking, you can use them on only one of the two networks.

In other cases, it might have to do with the frequencies used by a carrier. T-Mobile and AT&T use different frequencies for their 3G networks, and a phone might simply be built to support only the 3G frequencies used by one of the carriers and not the other.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox and my other columns at the new All Things Digital website, http://walt.allthingsd.com. Email mossberg@wsj.com.

Second, Amitabh Srivastava, head of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform business, announced that he’s leaving the company. Srivastava, who joined Microsoft in 1997, was widely considered to be a possible successor to Muglia, but lost out to Nadella.

One of the few ever to be named a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft–an honor now known as Technical Fellow–he was tapped, along with Brian Valentine, by then Windows chief Jim Allchin to take over the Windows engineering efforts in 2003 at a time when the operating system was being widely derided as plagued with security and other problems. Srivastava had his team draw up a map depicting how all the various pieces of the Windows source fit together. It was eight feet tall, 11 feet wide, and was described in a 2005 Wall Street Journal story as looking like a “haphazard train map with hundreds of tracks crisscrossing each other.”

Srivastava and Valentine are credited with the 2004 proposal to streamline how all those pieces functioned, a plan that would allow various features to be added or removed without disrupting the whole operating system. The idea was a partial response to the looming threat from Google, which that year had launched Gmail. The problem was their plan required throwing out a lot of legacy source code that had been in Windows for years, and starting fresh.

Srivastava’s changes included automating testing on features that had for years been done by hand. Code with too many bugs were sent to “code jail.” Over time, code flowing into what was to become Windows Vista improved.

We all know what happened with Vista–it too was widely panned. But the engineering processes put in place had a lot to do with the many improvements that appeared in Windows 7.

Srivastava then moved on to a new Microsoft project in 2006, code named Red Dog, now known as Azure, which launched in 2008. From this he pivoted to running the server and cloud division, overseeing Microsoft’s relationships with enterprise and data center customers.

People I’ve been talking to who tend to know a lot about the internal politics at Microsoft say this isn’t the last of the changes. Now that Muglia’s replacement has been announced, Nadella is going to want to name key members for his team, which means that those not tapped will probably choose to leave as well. The management shake-up at Microsoft is not over yet.

Srivastava has a Ph.D. in computer science from Penn State, and was invited to deliver the commencement address at the school’s College of Engineering in 2008, which is in the video below. Key quote: “In the end, it’s all about execution.”

Netflix’s dramatic growth in user base and market cap have had a lot to do with the company anticipating market changes and making audacious bets, but it has been relatively plodding and hesitant about getting social.

Netflix explained in the shareholder letter (PDF) accompanying its quarterly earnings report that its Facebook integration will accompany an effort to split household accounts into multiple personal accounts.

In part because of the company’s history as a DVD mailing service, a Netflix account is affiliated with a particular address. That’s also the way traditional television providers measure their market: In terms of households.

But online video, Netflix notes, “is more naturally individual, since it is watched on personal screens like phones, tablets, and laptops, as well as on shared large screen televisions.”

In addition to helping identify discrete people within a household, Facebook integration would presumably allow Netflix to help users do things like share their personal viewing history in their newsfeed and recommend videos to friends. Understanding social networks could improve Netflix’s famously honed recommendation algorithm. It might also be an opportunity for Netflix to create social viewing experiences.

Currently, Netflix lacks much in the way of social features; it had yanked a previous effort to offer social sharing last year after saying that relatively few subscribers used it.

However, the company has recently staffed up for a renewed social effort.

Mike Hart, previously Netflix’s director of engineering for APIs, is now director of engineering for social. Hart told Fast Company in November that Netflix sees social as an international user acquisition strategy and an opportunity to avoid disruption by a competitor that is more social.

Netflix also appears to view personal accounts as an opportunity to charge more money. The company said in the shareholder letter that later this year it will start offering new account options that include multiple simultaneous streams. (So, for instance, you could stream TV episodes in the bedroom on your iPad while your spouse watches a movie in the living room through the Roku.) The streaming-only plan Netflix recently launched costs $7.99 (which some industry watchers say is too cheap) and allows just one stream at a time.

Netflix noted in the letter that its new grand internal vision is to target the number of active mobile phones in an area, rather than the number of households (though that might be a bit ambitious in places where it’s common for people to have more than one phone!).

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

It’s definitely an oldie–from a 2005 speech that Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs gave at Stanford University, after recovering from his first bout with pancreatic cancer–but a truly good one.

BoomTown posted it last time there was a hubbub around what and what was not known about his poor health in 2009.

As everyone knows now, it appears that Jobs has suffered some sort of relapse, which is causing even more debate about his medical privacy.

As I wrote then:

“So let’s slow things down, shall we, and get some much-needed perspective this speech surely has (in other words, the inevitable finger-pointing and shareholder lawsuits can wait).”

Indeed, as you wil see below.

Here’s the video of the speech, as well as the full text:

The 2005 Jobs Stanford Commencement Address:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky–I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation–the Macintosh–a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30, I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down–that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me–I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, “Toy Story,” and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up, so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma–which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called “The Whole Earth Catalog,” which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of “The Whole Earth Catalog,” and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Twitter has been ordered by a U.S. federal judge to turn over documents related to several people involved with WikiLeaks to the Justice Department.

Tonight, a Twitter spokeswoman responded to a request for comment on the situation:

“We’re not going to comment on specific requests, but, to help users protect their rights, it’s our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so. We outline this policy in our law enforcement guidelines.”

In an onstage interview I did with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo at a D@CES event last night in Las Vegas, he referenced the issue, but would not give any specifics.

While he said he could not talk about WikiLeaks specifically, he indicated that he disliked government mandates to keep things quiet and reiterated Twitter’s desire to connect people with useful information.

“We’re going to lash out at things that prevent us from doing that, as aggressively as we can,” said Costolo, who also used Twitter crackdowns in China as an example.

It might be a Herculean task to fight the federal government, which is aggressively going after WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

Some Web companies, such as eBay’s PayPal unit, have cut off WikiLeaks.

On the other hand, Twitter took legal action to unseal the court order, which allowed it to inform those involved, giving them 10 days to object. Otherwise, the San Francisco microblogging service would have had to turn over information without the knowledge of these users.

There will surely be more of these to other Web companies, with obvious candidates being Google and Facebook.

The order from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is ordering Twitter to fork over subscriber names, user names, screen names, mailing addresses, residential addresses and more of several people involved with WikiLeaks.

But you can read for yourself–here is the court order, as well as the unsealing order:

twitter1

twitter2

Yahoo spokeswoman Dana Lengkeek just emailed a statement saying that some Yahoo users were required to reset their passwords. “As part of our ongoing security measures we issued a password reset to some users. Yahoo! does this periodically to ensure the security of users.” She didn’t specify whether or not this was in direct response to the Gawker incident, but it’s not hard to conclude that it was, given the timing. I’ll update if Yahoo says anything further.

I have a Yahoo account and was required to change my password today, and yes, I also had a Gawker commenting account, so at this point it’s safe to say they certainly seem connected.

Meanwhile, Blizzard Entertainment (developer of World of Warcraft and provider of the Battle.net gaming service) was abundantly clear about the connection in an email to its customers. “We’ve recently been informed that several Gawker Media websites have been compromised…To help minimize the effects of this compromise and help keep your Battle.net account safe and secure, we’ve reset your account password,” it said.

Other Web incidents–perhaps connected to Gawkergate, perhaps not–have occurred during the past few days as well. For instance, McDonald’s disclosed that a database containing email address and birthdates of people who had signed up to receive promotions was compromised. It notified those customers on Monday. Again, it’s not clear what connection, if any, there may be to the Gawker incident, but the timing certainly makes it seem possible. I’ve asked McDonald’s for a comment and will update if I get one.

In another incident, drugstore chain Walgreens disclosed on Friday that a database of email address belonging to its customers had been breached. Given the timing–the Gawker incident happened over the weekend–it’s probably not connected, though it’s hard to be sure, as the folks at Anonymous Gnosis, the group that attacked the Gawker sites, say they’ve had access to the database for about a month. I’ve asked a Walgreens spokesman for a comment, and as with all the other cases above will update if I hear back.

This comes on top of other related forced password changes at Twitter and LinkedIn, as my colleague Peter Kafka reported earlier today.

Meanwhile, our friends at Digits have a fascinating graphic on the Top 50 passwords used on Gawker. Topping the list: “123456,” “password” and “12345678.” The two lessons in all this? Make your passwords complex, and don’t use the same password for multiple sites.

Example 1: Twitter saw a rash of promotional tweets for a bogus berry weight-loss product, the result of a security breach thought to be connected to the Gawker break-in.

Example 2: LinkedIn has temporarily disabled the accounts of any users whose email addresses turned up in the public database of hacked accounts. It’s asking those users to reset their passwords.

LinkedIn PR guy Hani Durzy says the move, which started yesterday afternoon, has only affected a “small fraction” of LinkedIn’s 85 million members. He says the social network made the decision proactively, not because it had any evidence that any accounts had been misused;  LinkedIn now has a blog post on the topic.

Some context/math: Gawker has said it has had to notify users of 1.5 million email addresses to change their passwords following the break-in.

If, for argument’s sake, half of those emails belonged to LinkedIn users, that would be less than one percent of the company’s user base. And likely much less: For some reason I have two emails connected to my single LinkedIn account. And both were exposed during Gawkergate, so I got two emails this morning.

No real debacles so far, but that doesn’t mean we won’t see them. Who’s next?

In large part, that’s because if Facebook Messages were evaluated as an email system, it would look terrible. There’s no incorporation of IMAP so you can access your mail from other clients, there’s no way to save drafts, there’s no way to cc people, there are no folders.

Even more jarring, there are no subject lines or time stamps, and you only ever have one continuous conversation with a contact. Instead, like instant messaging, when you type a message and press enter, it gets set loose to your contact.

But maybe Facebook has a point, and we don’t need all that cc, bcc gobbledygook for personal communications. Maybe we just want to more casually correspond with each other. And some of these email conventions have probably outlived their usefulness. Facebook says prior to the change its top three subject lines were blank, “Hi!” and “Yo.”–if that tells you anything.

The problem is, the way Facebook Messages works is a bit complicated and unfamiliar. You can see why the company is rolling it out very, very slowly–it’s the kind of new experience that aggravates people and makes them whiny.

Facebook Messages treats the correspondence between you and another person as a single conversation, whether it’s by IM, within the Facebook Messages interface, received as an email or as a Facebook-delivered SMS. Often those channels overlap. Messages that are not from Facebook members, and those from entities other than individuals, get shunted to a second-tier inbox.

Yesterday I was playing with the new Messages, first within the Messages interface on the Facebook Web site, then on IM on the Web site, and then via text message when I closed my computer. A few things confused me–for instance, chat is disabled and disappears when you go into Messages. I guess it’s redundant to have the same conversation in two places. But as someone who felt like I was in an IM chat, it was super weird.

Another thing that’s odd is that those life-time conversation threads only really work for one-to-one relationships. Group messages seem like a little bit of an afterthought; for instance, group threads show a split-screen image of two of the participants’ profile pics, no matter how many people participate. The system is prejudiced against people who email you from outside Facebook (say, your mother emails your @Facebook.com address from an @Yahoo.com address), until you explicitly say you want to see them in your main Facebook inbox. If a person sends you messages from two email addresses, Facebook doesn’t allow you to help it understand that they are the same person.

While I will probably acclimate to the Messages experience over the next few weeks, one thing that’s going to continue to be very annoying, and accentuated by Messages, is redundant Facebook notifications. Already a problem for those of us who use Facebook on multiple platforms like the Web and a phone app, redundant notifications run rampant in Facebook Messages. Say someone sends you a message from the Web site and checks the box to send it to your phone. Without changing any defaults, you could get a text message from Facebook, an email message from Facebook, a new IM on the Web site and a flag that you have a new message in the Facebook nav bar.

I spoke to Messages product manager Dan Hsiao yesterday, and he said the team had thought carefully about trimming down notifications but decided it would be worse if users weren’t alerted to the fact that they had a message.

Hsiao said that his mantra in building the product was to make it “email compatible but not email complete.”

I think there will be two main outcomes from the new Facebook Messages:

• Other Web mail outfits will (and should) better integrate their email and instant messaging conversations, based on Facebook’s example. Folks like Gmail can go one better, and incorporate additional forms of communication like voice messages. Facebook is right–there’s no reason this shouldn’t all be condensed and scannable.
• Provided the Facebook Messages product doesn’t have major usability issues, it will continue to supplant email, especially for young people. There will be a bigger distinction between formal, especially corporate, correspondence via email and personal messages. If you think about it, we all already make a distinction between messages from people and messages from mailing lists, and Facebook is right to say the ones from people are more important.

The thing is, Facebook Messages splits out a part of the communication experience that is, for most, a part of other tools and services.

Facebook Messages won’t replace email for people who use email for professional purposes, people who prefer desktop mail clients or people who firmly associate themselves and their archive of emails with an existing address.

Rather than killing Gmail (and its much larger competitors Hotmail and Yahoo), Facebook Messages will probably have the biggest impact on usage of IM services like AIM and GChat. The only thing the new product will fully replace is the previous version of Facebook Messages–which, by the way, has 350 million active users, and four billion messages sent per day.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

At the St. Regis hotel in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg says young people say email is too slow. They prefer Facebook or SMS.

Zuck: IM or SMS are much simpler, and people want lighter-weight things that they can use all over the place. So we need…a modern messaging system.

350 million people actively use messaging on Facebook, in part because it’s really simple. Four billion messages are sent per day. This is “private, private sharing.”

Next-generation messaging would be: seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short. (Those are a lot of synonyms, no?)

“This is not email. Email is one way that people will use this system, but it’s not even the primary way we think they will use it.”

Now a three-panel slide is up showing the key topics of the announcement–”seamless messaging,” “conversation history” and “social inbox.” Zuckerberg promises, “We can do some really good filtering for you to make sure you only see messages you really care about.”

Zuck brings on Andrew Bosworth to demo the product.

So this is actually a relaunch of the “Messages” tool. Not email-specific. Takes all correspondence between two friends and puts them in one place.

Everyone gets an @facebook.com email address with their username. “As much as we’re providing an email address, the system’s not email,” says Boz–more like instant messaging.

Boz uses convo about dinner plans as an example, with messaging across different platforms, including IM on Facebook, email, iPhone notifications, etc. The example restaurant is Piccino in San Francisco, where, fun fact, I was for a short time the Foursquare mayor. No longer though.

Integrates with Jabber, IMAP and one more I missed. (Sorry, first time liveblogging with this tool!)

Boz shows the history of Facebook messages with his girlfriend of the last four years. But doesn’t include their instant messages and other communication. Individual messages may not be profound, but collectively they provide a narrative about someone I care about, says Boz.

Facebook rebuilt infrastructure for this project, because it’s especially important that messages don’t get lost.

Instead of Cassandra (which FB created for email search and then open sourced), the company chose something new: HBase. They also used Haystack, Thrift, ZooKeeper and memcache.

This is the biggest engineering team Facebook has ever put together for a launch–15 people, Boz says.

Users have three categories: 1) Messages: Conversations with actual people. 2) Other: Email lists and the like. And 3) Junk.

The big idea is “picking up where you left off” no matter what device or medium.

This project has been in the works for the last 15 months.

Zuck: “This is not an email killer. This is a messaging system that includes email as a part of it. We don’t expect anyone to wake up tomorrow and say, I’m going to shut down my Yahoo account or my Gmail account and switch to Facebook.”

(Read: You silly press, we’re not competing with Gmail, we’re bigger than Gmail!)

Rolling out slowly over the next few months, starting with an invite system (ha! how Gmail!).

Oh, about IMAP: No support yet, so users can’t synch with other email systems. But Facebook wants to add later.

Interesting: Facebook messages won’t have subject lines. You just have a single messaging history with each person.

If you have been interacting with someone through email, then we’ll send replies back to email. You can indicate that you want a message to go directly to their phone. If you’re online, you get a message as an IM.

Boz: This is the end of “BRB” or “GTG.” Follows you wherever you go. (Sounds ominous when you say it like that.)

Question from audience: Will you add voice or video?

Zuck: For now only SMS, IM, email and FB messages–all are text. “We think this is a pretty big step by itself, and one we just wanted to take before we get started on the next set of things.”

Question from audience: Will you have contextual ads?

Zuck: Yes, ads work the same as on the rest of Facebook, but not targeted specific to content in a message.

Zuck on Gmail competition: “They have a great product. Email is still really important to a lot of people. If we build a great product that people want to use, then people will use it.”

Question from audience: Can users go off the record like in Gmail?

Boz: Users can delete any message.

Zuck: Off the record like in IM doesn’t make sense because users may be receiving messages in a different way than you send them. If someone gets something in email instead of IM it would be unnatural to have it off the record.

Question: How will this treat communication with people who are not on Facebook?

Boz: You can communicate with whoever you want to, and will have access to all that history of the conversation.

Zuck: If you’re not a part of the FB system and outside the social graph, your emails to FB users will go into “Other” folder to start off with, rather than the main. Once the recipient says you’re an important person, you’ll go into the main folder.

Question: What about silly joke emails from your mom? Can you filter those?

Zuck: There’s only one thread with every person.

Question: What about Facebook employee email addresses?

Zuck: “After a long discussion, the Farm Bureau has agreed to give us fb.com. And in the terms of that we have agreed not to sell farm subsidies.”

Facebook hasn’t mentioned this, but Microsoft just emailed to make sure people know they’re involved.

“As part of Facebook’s new messaging system: http://apps.facebook.com/facebooklive/ –Microsoft is integrating the Office experience. Over the coming months, customers will be able to access and share Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents as attachments to their Facebook messages. Sharing new ideas, key points of inspiration and important information just got easier–even when the need to access or share that content strikes in the middle of your latest status update.”

Question: Can you fill in the blanks of associating email addresses with Facebook friends?

Boz: Not yet, but it’s imaginable.

(Uh-oh–how is this going to work when people have multiple contacts for themselves?)

Question: Storage?

“If you’re a good user, you have no concern. For people who try to find limits, they will find them.” Another ominous comment from Boz.

Okay, they’re cutting us off.

Here’s the Facebook blog post on the announcement.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Who would have thought that the enterprise business would be this interesting?

But the continuing mishegas between Hewlett-Packard (HP), Oracle (ORCL) and the controversial move between the companies by exec Mark Hurd has now dragged in the New York Times (NYT).

Specifically, its star business columnist Joe Nocera, who penned a scathing piece a few days ago about the recent appointment of former SAP (SAP) top exec Léo Apotheker as CEO of HP to replace Hurd.

Wrote Nocera, as he wound up his fastball:

“Still, having written two unflattering columns recently about the H.P. board, I was inclined to take a pass on Mr. Apotheker’s hiring. But then I learned something about him that caused me to shake my head in disbelief.”

The thrust of Nocera’s column about a lawsuit over intellectual property theft between SAP and Oracle: Don’t throw stones at Hurd when you have such a dirty glass house.

But I am synopsizing, so here is the letter incoming HP chairman Ray Lane–who, by the way, once worked as president at Oracle until he and CEO Larry Ellison had a falling out.

You know, the non-shy and non-retiring Larry Ellison who has been sending constant verbal stink bombs over to the HP board of late–most recently at Apotheker–and who hired Hurd.

Folks, you cannot make this stuff up.

Here’s Lane’s letter (I removed all the email addresses) to the Times:

From: Ray Lane
Sent: Monday, October 11, 2010 8:59 AM
To: XXX
Cc: XXX
Subject: Letter to the Editor, NY Times

To the Editor:

Joe Nocera’s column, “A Double Standard at H.P.,” (October 9, 2010) grossly mischaracterizes the facts about why Mark Hurd had to leave HP, why the HP Board hired Léo Apotheker as CEO and the reason Oracle is trying to draw Mr. Apotheker into its lawsuit over TomorrowNow.

First, the lawsuit on TomorrowNow: Mr. Nocera concedes the suit between Oracle and SAP (and its now-shuttered subsidiary, TomorrowNow) is old news. Oracle has been litigating this case for years and has never offered any evidence that Mr. Apotheker was involved. It didn’t even deem him relevant enough to the case to include him on a list of witnesses for trial–until, that is, Mr. Apotheker was named CEO of HP and Oracle had other motives to try to tie him to the case.

The facts are: TomorrowNow was never under Mr. Apotheker’s supervision. The conduct in question at TomorrowNow occurred before Mr. Apotheker became CEO of SAP. And, it was Mr. Apotheker who, as CEO of SAP, shut down TomorrowNow. Mr. Nocera’s reporting on the case is sharply contradicted by that of an independent industry analyst–someone with real knowledge of the industry and the facts–who makes clear that Mr. Apotheker was not involved (http://ematters.wordpress.com/2010/10/09/setting-the-record-straight-oracle-sap-tomorrownow-and-the-nyt/).

As for the reasons why Mr. Hurd left HP: no Board can retain a CEO who violates the trust and integrity needed to lead a public company. Even Mr. Hurd publicly acknowledged that he failed to uphold those necessary standards. In the press release announcing his departure, he said that “… there were instances in which I did not live up to the standards and principles of trust, respect and integrity that I have espoused at HP…I believe it would be difficult for me to continue as an effective leader at HP and I believe this is the only decision the board and I could make at this time.” (Emphasis added.)

The bottom line is: Mr. Hurd violated the trust of the Board by repeatedly lying to them in the course of an investigation into his conduct. He violated numerous elements of HP’s Standards of Business Conduct and he demonstrated a serious lack of integrity and judgment. The Board was unanimous in its decision that he must go, including the seven directors Mr. Hurd recruited to the Board. These directors would not have acted unanimously to remove Mr. Hurd for “piddling expense account problems” as Mr. Nocera suggests. I was named to the Board after Mr. Hurd’s departure, but having carefully reviewed all the facts, it is clear to me the HP Board made the right decision. Had I been on the Board at that time, there’s no question I would have voted the same way. The Board simply had no alternative.

In hiring Léo Apotheker, HP’s Board turned to a principled leader of outstanding personal and professional integrity. He is an experienced, strategic thinker with the passion, global experience and operational discipline to realize our company’s enormous potential. Those are the qualities HP needs in a leader to move the company forward, and Mr. Apotheker is ideally suited to do that.

Sincerely,

Ray Lane
Incoming Non-Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors

Yesterday marked the end for Xmarks, the Mitch Kapor-backed social bookmarking start-up that was founded in 2006.

What was most remarkable to BoomTown was the classiness and honesty of the goodbye, especially in Silicon Valley, which is loath to call a failure just that.

That was certainly clear in a terrific blog post about its history, titled “End of the Road for Xmarks,” written by its CTO and co-founder Todd Agulnick.

After noting Xmarks’ substantive growth as a browser synchronization service, he wrote:

“Tomorrow, however, will hardly be anything but typical, for tomorrow one of our engineers will start a script that will email each of our users to notify them that we’ll be ceasing operations in around 90 days.”

In the fascinating post, Agulnick did note that the company came close to selling recently. Actually, I heard it had gotten close twice and to no avail.

The San Francisco-based company–which had been called Foxmarks initially–had been seed-funded by Kapor, the well-known tech entrepreneur, and also got an additional investment from First Round Capital.

Xmarks garnered another $5 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures in 2008,

That year, it also hired Silicon Valley entrepreneur James Joaquin as CEO, whose job it was to carve out a business with Xmarks’ assets, including using its mass of data.

Xmarks had certainly been growing its user base and bookmarked Web addresses strongly, via a browser widget that recorded bookmarking information.

Earlier this year, it tried out an advertising product called SearchBoost, which gave advertisers additional analytics about their ads, as well as organic search results.

But all that ultimately did not translate into a viable business model for Xmarks.

At the time of launching this money-making effort in April, Kapor said that after growing its user base of actives, this was the next logical step for Xmarks.

“This is the effort to move from that category to the category of sustainable enterprises,” he said. “And that is certainly a good thing.”

But, as Agulnick concluded:

“We built it and it put it front of potential advertisers. Many were interested, but ultimately the feedback was negative: our user base was too small to be worth their time and attention.”

After thanking investors, employees, users and others, Agulnick ended:

“In the words of Douglas Adams, so long and thanks for all the fish.”

Indeed.

Looking back to happier times, here is a video interview I did with Joaquin in late 2008 about Xmarks’ prospects:

From the horse trail of our Western All Things Digital HQ, BoomTown could not resist posting this internal email from AOL exec Brad Garlinghouse, which was sent out to employees this afternoon.

Apparently, the striving New York-based Internet company is changing its email address to reflect its morale goals. Presto, it’s the peppy @teamaol.com and no longer the duller @corp.aol.com.

Wouldn’t it be nice if it was this easy to change the AOL (AOL) stock price?

From: Garlinghouse, Brad

Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2010 4:28 PM

To: Team AOL

Subject: Team AOL!

AOLers–

As part of our mission to continue to drive a culture around teamwork–and, let’s face it–not to appear as if we’re in an episode of “The Office”–we are changing all corporate email addresses from @corp.aol.com to @teamaol.com–effective immediately. The roll-out will begin today at 9pm ET and should be completed shortly thereafter.

Here’s how it will work:

· Your emails and replies will now come from “first.last@teamaol.com”

· Emails sent to “first.last@corp.aol.com” will automatically be redirected to “first.last@teamaol.com”

· Distribution groups within Exchange will be automatically updated

· Listserv will take a bit more time to update so, for now email traffic will still flow from the original domain “first.last@corp.aol.com”

· Business cards with the new domain will be rolled out in conjunction with our new canvas collection

I realize this is a small step but I believe an important, subtle signal both internally and externally that we’re changing the way we think as a company and more importantly, our approach to the way we work together as a team.

A big thanks to Alex Gounares and team for making this happen so quickly!

Best,
Brad

To help AOLers get in the mood, here’s a video of some clips from “The Office,” although we feel that “Wonder Pets” might be a better reference point:

Dear Valued Customer,

Recently there was an issue that affected some of our customers with AT&T 3G service for iPad resulting in the release of their customer email addresses. I am writing to let you know that no other information was exposed and the matter has been resolved. We apologize for the incident and any inconvenience it may have caused. Rest assured, you can continue to use your AT&T 3G service on your iPad with confidence. Here’s some additional detail:

On June 7 we learned that unauthorized computer “hackers” maliciously exploited a function designed to make your iPad log-in process faster by pre-populating an AT&T authentication page with the email address you used to register your iPad for 3G service. The self-described hackers wrote software code to randomly generate numbers that mimicked serial numbers of the AT&T SIM card for iPad–called the integrated circuit card identification (ICC-ID)–and repeatedly queried an AT&T web address. When a number generated by the hackers matched an actual ICC-ID, the authentication page log-in screen was returned to the hackers with the email address associated with the ICC-ID already populated on the log-in screen.

The hackers deliberately went to great efforts with a random program to extract possible ICC-IDs and capture customer email addresses. They then put together a list of these emails and distributed it for their own publicity. As soon as we became aware of this situation, we took swift action to prevent any further unauthorized exposure of customer email addresses. Within hours, AT&T disabled the mechanism that automatically populated the email address. Now, the authentication page log-in screen requires the user to enter both their email address and their password. I want to assure you that the email address and ICC-ID were the only information that was accessible. Your password, account information, the contents of your email, and any other personal information were never at risk. The hackers never had access to AT&T communications or data networks, or your iPad. AT&T 3G service for other mobile devices was not affected. While the attack was limited to email address and ICC-ID data, we encourage you to be alert to scams that could attempt to use this information to obtain other data or send you unwanted email. You can learn more about phishing by visiting the AT&T website.

AT&T takes your privacy seriously and does not tolerate unauthorized access to its customers’ information or company websites. We will cooperate with law enforcement in any investigation of unauthorized system access and to prosecute violators to the fullest extent of the law.

AT&T acted quickly to protect your information–and we promise to keep working around the clock to keep your information safe. Thank you very much for your understanding, and for being an AT&T customer. In the next few days, you will also receive this information via U.S. postal mail.

Sincerely,
Dorothy Attwood
Senior Vice President, Public Policy and Chief Privacy Officer for AT&T

Earlier today, I wrote a piece about how I was one of the 114,000 AT&T customers whose email and device identity numbers had been easily exposed earlier this week via a flaw in the way the company registered the Apple (AAPL) iPad 3G for cellular access.

In my post, I complained that I had yet to hear from the telecom giant about the security snafu and release of my personal email address, which AT&T (T) had yet to acknowledge to those impacted.

Well, the company does read tech blogs, so this morning, this communication from a PR honcho was sent to my work email, which is available on this site publicly.

Regrets? AT&T has a few:

Hi Kara:

I am writing to apologize that your personal e-mail address was made public. As you know, we fixed the flaw that caused this almost as soon as we heard about it from one of our business customers. But that doesn’t change the fact that your personal information was exposed without your permission. That is something we truly regret.

Nothing is more important to us than protecting the privacy of customer information. You should know that in this case, the only thing compromised was your email address and not, for example, the contents of your email or any other personal information. And as you also know, the problem only affected iPad 3G customers. No other mobile devices or customers were involved.

Thanks very much for your patience. Please let me know if there is anything we can do for you or if you have any questions.

Mark Siegel
Executive Director-Media Relations
AT&T
[Address redacted]
[Work phone number redacted]
[Mobile phone number}
[Email address redacted]

As you can see, I used my crack security system–DELETE!–to save Siegel any incursions into his privacy.

And while I do appreciate the reaching out, I still want to hear–as do others affected–officially from AT&T about exactly what’s what.

Siegel told me in a follow-up email: “We are finalizing our plans for communicating with customers.”

(Suggestion to make us happy: A free iPhone 4 might be a sweet gesture. Only kidding!! Sort of.)

In addition, I am not sure, as he wrote in the initial email, whether it is comforting or not that it was only my email and only my iPad 3G that were violated.

That’s sort of like telling me that only one room of my digital house was broken into, although nothing good was taken, so not to worry.

Actually, if that happened in real life, I would still call the police. That is, if the call on my iPhone didn’t drop.

Again, I kid! Sort of.

According to a report initially posted on Gawker Media’s Valleywag site, the telecom giant had a flaw that allowed a group of computer experts to expose the email addresses and identity numbers of 114,000 owners of the popular tablet device.

Including mine.

That would be my personal one from Comcast (CMCSA), which you can see here in an obscured list of others–including some prominent officials in government.

AT&T (T) had my email because it was used to sign up for mobile service for the Apple (AAPL) iPad’s 3G version, automatically appearing during registration.

Now the Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into the AT&T breach, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal, in what seems to be an early probe.

Oooh, the Feds are involved now.

I wish I could say it will make a difference. Because it won’t.

In fact, coming on the heels of privacy controversies at Facebook and Google (GOOG), it’s just another log on the digital fire that has been burning up privacy for a very long time now.

And now more than ever, it is part of a massive confluence of trends, including:

Consumers more interested than ever in sharing information about themselves in order to make ever better social networking connections online; a plethora of innovative devices–mostly mobile–and Internet tools available to seamlessly and easily allow those consumers to do so; and, perhaps most of all, Internet companies intent on hoovering up as much information as possible, in order to garner more consumers and sell it to advertisers.

In large part, this is all well and good, creating a range of valuable and entertaining services at little or no cost and making the computing experience more personal and relevant.

Because of that, I have to admit I was less tweaked than I thought I would be, although I wish I were not.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose email was also compromised, expressed the feeling best.

“It shouldn’t be pretty hard to figure out my email address,” he was quoted saying in the Journal article. “To me, it wasn’t that big a deal.”

That’s because all of us are thinking less that such information is private or will remain that way for long.

See this handy illustration, below, from the Journal, about how the iPads were hacked so easily and you get the picture quickly.

And, indeed, I am one of those who puts a great deal of information about myself out there for many to see, from my email on Facebook to my locations on Foursquare to my thoughts on Twitter to photos and videos everywhere.

That said, like others, I have also begun to rethink some of this, recently removing my phone number and other personal information from Facebook and other places where I had stashed them in plain sight, making them harder to find.

Of course, I also know that retrieving much of my personal information is now a lost cause, like trying to unmix cream poured into coffee.

Still, companies, especially those entrusted with this information, should not be quite so sanguine as consumers have become.

I still haven’t heard from AT&T, for example, which is somewhat irksome since the company has known about the issue for days now.

And as each of these incidents occurs, you get the feeling of execs either too obtuse or thoughtless or, yes, cynical to make this a priority.

They should, since the avalanche of information being made available will only increase, with possibly dire circumstances if not handled well.

Hollywood actress Joan Crawford had it right in a famous quote: “Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.”

Substitute “Digital living” for love and it’s the very same message.

A security breach at AT&T has exposed the email address of thousands iPad owners–among them a who’s-who of the media and political elite.

Valleywag reports that by exploiting a vulnerability in the AT&T Web site, hacker group Goatse Security was able to collect email addresses associated with the SIM integrated circuit card identifiers, or ICC IDs, in the 3G version of Apple’s (AAPL) new slate device. And it collected some 114,000 of them–from New York Times Co. (NYT) CEO Janet Robinson to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel–before notifying AT&T (T) of the breach so the carrier could repair it.

Interestingly, AT&T claims it was a business customer who alerted it to vulnerability on Monday, and not Goatse or Valleywag. The carrier says that the only information compromised were ICC IDs and the email addresses attached to them. And contrary to some rumors making the rounds, AT&T says it is not advising iPad 3G owners to disable 3G.

Obviously, this is an ugly humiliation for AT&T. But as a security breach, it’s not devastating. The only data compromised were email addresses and ICC IDs. The former could be sold to spammers, and I’m not sure there’s much ill to be done with the latter. Which is not to downplay the severity of the incident. AT&T’s negligence here is deeply troubling–and worth remembering every time we entrust our personal data to someone else.

AT&T, which would not tell me exactly how many Apple iPad 3G users are affected, did release the following statement:

AT&T was informed by a business customer on Monday of the potential exposure of their iPad ICC IDS. The only information that can be derived from the ICC IDS is the e-mail address attached to that device.

This issue was escalated to the highest levels of the company and was corrected by Tuesday; and we have essentially turned off the feature that provided the e-mail addresses.

The person or group who discovered this gap did not contact AT&T.

We are continuing to investigate and will inform all customers whose e-mail addresses and ICC IDS may have been obtained. At this point, there is no evidence that any other customer information was shared.

We take customer privacy very seriously and while we have fixed this problem, we apologize to our customers who were impacted.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

Last night, BoomTown headed to San Francisco’s wedding-cake City Hall to attend “The 25 Years of .Com Gala,” which is honoring a quarter-century that I have been jacked into the matrix.

Actually, it’s the 25th anniversary of the .com Internet domain name.

VeriSign (VRSN), which administers the .com registry, sponsored the party, as well as a recent confab in Washington, D.C.

While the growth of .com was slow until the browser became popularized–numbering under 15,000 addresses in 1992–there are now close to 85 million .com domains. This innovative commercial designation is clearly the most important one, both financially and perceptually.

Thus, time to party at an event emceed by Web 1.0 comic favorite Dana Carvey.

He was funny, but perhaps the most enjoyable blast from the past was the appearance of jeans-clad former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, who most definitely retains the title of Clown Prince of Silicon Valley as the needler-in-chief of then-dominant Microsoft (MSFT).

After being one of the superstars of Web 1.0, the wise-cracking McNealy has been missing in action in tech of late, as Sun’s influence waned. The company was sold to Oracle (ORCL) recently.

Ironically, given all the hubbub over Facebook’s privacy screw-ups this week, it was McNealy who famously said in a 1999 interview: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

For last night’s crowd, he rendered a very adorkable list of the many reasons he was surprised that the .com was getting feted.

Here’s the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100527/scott-mcnealys-top-15-reasons-hes-surprised-were-celebrating-of-the-25th-anniversary-of-the-web/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100315/boomtown-in-d-c-to-say-happy-25th-birthday-to-com-and-hello-to-broadband-plan/ http://allthingsd.com/20100315/boomtown-in-d-c-to-say-happy-25th-birthday-to-com-and-hello-to-broadband-plan/#comments Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:54:33 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25604

Last night, I jetted east to Washington, D.C., for an unusual confluence of events: The 25th anniversary of the .com Internet domain name and the Federal Communications Commission’s release of the much anticipated National Broadband Plan.

Both are set for tomorrow in the nation’s capital and both concern the impact of the Web on the United States in the past and the future.

Incredibly, .com was almost .cor, for corporate.

And the first .com address handed out–Symbolics.com–belonged to a now-defunct Massachusetts computer company.

(It signed up via the domain registrar, Network Solutions, which was bought by VeriSign in 2000. The Symbolics.com domain was sold in 2009 to Missouri-based XF.com, which “operates commercial real estate and premium domain properties.”)

In honor of the anniversary, VeriSign (VRSN), which administers the .com registry, is hosting a policy forum in D.C. It includes a keynote address by former President Bill Clinton, as well as some panels.

I will be moderating the one in the afternoon titled “The Next Generation.” The panelists, looking to the future, include, among others: Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post; Aneesh Chopra, Federal CTO of the U.S.; and Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures.

There will be another gala event to honor Internet innovators in San Francisco in late May.

While the growth of .com was slow until the browser became popularized–numbering under 15,000 in 1992–there are now close to 85 million .com domains. This commercial one is clearly the most important of the designations, both financially and perceptually.

Still, despite how much impact the Internet has had globally, spurred mostly by innovation in the U.S., this country still remains woefully behind in high-speed access to the Web.

While it is easy–and fun–to blame the greedy telcos and cable companies (and they do deserve some of the blame), the lack of a federal imperative has been the most appalling explanation.

It is as if the federal government had decided dirt roads were preferable to the highway system or tin cans and string were better than universal telephone access.

Will making broadband access easy, fast and cheap for most people in the U.S. be the end result of the National Broadband Plan, to be officially unveiled by the FCC tomorrow?

As I wrote last week:

“The two key questions about the effort to get the United States up to speed, so to speak, with decent digital access: Will it be toothless or not and will there be any money to pay for it, given the cash-strapped federal government?”

A possible highlight of the plan concerns whether spectrum should be allocated for a free or inexpensive high-speed wireless service, as well as restoration of some regulations lifted in the previous Republican administration.

But the main focus will be that the U.S. needs high-speed access to improve dramatically across the nation, especially for poorer citizens and in rural areas.

After a quarter-century of .com, the growth of a trillion-dollar industry from one punctuation mark and three letters, and badillions of page views, you would think this would be glaringly obvious to our federal government.

You should think it would.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100315/boomtown-in-d-c-to-say-happy-25th-birthday-to-com-and-hello-to-broadband-plan/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20091215/microsofts-bing-app-debuts-on-iphone-so-whens-the-android-version-coming/ http://allthingsd.com/20091215/microsofts-bing-app-debuts-on-iphone-so-whens-the-android-version-coming/#comments Wed, 16 Dec 2009 02:30:07 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=21990

Microsoft’s feisty little search service, Bing, has finally made an iPhone app, which is now up at the Apple iTunes app store.

Bing planned to show off the free application at a party thrown by its mobile team in San Francisco tonight, but BoomTown found it live on the site much earlier.

Information about the new app is also now on Microsoft’s Bing blog here.

The Bing app’s description at the iTunes Store says, “Make decisions and get where you need to go with Bing. See the Bing daily image and related trivia on the home screen. Search maps or the Web with your voice–even say an address. Use Image Search and flick through previews. Download Bing today to find stuff nearby and get there fast.”

A Bing PR email noted that key features of the app include a daily image from Bing.com; easy-to-access voice search; tips and tricks on the homepage; “Locate Me” functionality; and the ability to add pushpins, save locations and show multiple locations on a single map.

It’s all a sweet little irony, since Microsoft (MSFT) and Apple (AAPL) have been frenemies over the years.

But bowing to the power of the iPhone as the premier smartphone out there, Bing has to be on its ubiquitous platform if it wants to compete with Google (GOOG) and others in the mobile arena.

In related news, according to November data from comScore (SCOR), Bing’s market share rose to 10 percent. The growth is coming, apparently, from Microsoft’s new search partner, Yahoo (YHOO), rather than from Google.

Before all the hell-has-frozen-over jokes let loose, it should be noted that Microsoft already has some apps for the iPhone, such as the one for its Seadragon photo app, a Tag Reader app and various manual book apps.

And, while others have made apps that allow Microsoft’s popular software to work on the Apple device, it has yet to release one of its own, although sources said the company is working on them.

Microsoft has already made Bing apps for Windows phones, the BlackBerry from Research in Motion (RIMM), the Sidekick and select BREW-based devices on Verizon (VZ), as well as Bing mobile from a browser.

Company execs recently showed off a spate of innovations for Bing, including new mobile features, but not in an iPhone app.

But no matter how you look at it, the iPhone app is the big time.

Here are more screenshots of the app:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091215/microsofts-bing-app-debuts-on-iphone-so-whens-the-android-version-coming/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20090616/easy-way-to-log-in-face-time/ http://allthingsd.com/20090616/easy-way-to-log-in-face-time/#comments Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:20:02 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20090616/easy-way-to-log-in-face-time/ Nowadays, new laptops usually come with built-in Webcams, including the ultra-small, inexpensive models known as netbooks. But many people don’t know what to do with these Webcams or how to use them for videoconferencing with other people. Some don’t even realize their computers have these tiny videocameras.

This week, I tested a new videoconferencing-software program designed to help these people. It’s made especially for non-techies who simply want to use their Webcams to see someone while they’re talking to them. These people don’t want to conference several people into a call. And they especially don’t want to have to sign up for a confusing, intimidating videoconferencing service.

I used Logitech Vid by downloading it from www.logitech.com/vid. This program comes from Logitech Inc. and makes use of technology from SightSpeed, the videoconferencing-software company that Logitech acquired last fall. Vid works with Macs and Windows PCs that have built-in Webcams or those that use Webcams that plug into a computer’s USB port; it can even work if only one person has a Webcam so the person without one still sees video and hears audio from the other person.

Expiration Date for Some

If this was a free download for all, Logitech Vid would be a slam dunk for the consumer. But as of now, it is free only for people who use Logitech Webcams or the people they invite, and for people who are registered on SightSpeed or Dell Video Chat, Dell’s version of the SightSpeed service, regardless of their Webcam brand.

For everyone else, the software expires after 30 days, with no option to pay for continued use. This means Logitech misses out on the growing number of people whose laptops and desktops have built-in Webcams, but who don’t want to buy a Logitech camera just to use Vid (and shouldn’t have to). Logitech says it intends to add a payment plan for Vid.

I tested Vid with my parents, who recently bought a netbook for the kitchen but — before this column — didn’t quite know how to use its Webcam. I also tried it with tech-savvy friends who have video-chatted with me on programs like Skype, Apple’s iChat and Google Chat. Everyone had the same reaction: They liked Logitech Vid’s refreshingly clean interface and simple setup. My Mom appreciated Vid’s easy instructions, which are written in plain terms that anyone can understand.

Vid worked while I was video-chatting from one Mac to another; from a Mac to a Windows PC and vice versa; and from one Windows PC to another.

Invitations to Chat

I ran into trouble one night when Vid invitations that I sent to friends and family didn’t go through until after several attempts. Logitech says Vid was undergoing some behind-the-scenes server maintenance, which caused the glitches. (People who have trouble sending invitations like I did can alternatively direct friends to Logitech’s Web site to download the software.) And Vid didn’t work properly when I tried using it on my company-issued PC, which runs on a corporate network protected by firewalls. Logitech says Vid is targeted for consumer use, and not for sophisticated corporate environments.

Logitech Vid arranges photos of friends, along with their availability, in a visually pleasing carousel display.

People who are used to more advanced videoconferencing programs may find Vid unsatisfying. It doesn’t let friends instant message or share photos with one another, nor does it pull in buddy lists from outside videoconferencing programs. Vid isn’t designed to record conversations, host multiparty calls or take still photos during chats. Like other videoconferencing programs, slow Internet connections can occasionally cause video and audio to stutter.

But for simple video chats, Vid was a pleasure to use. If not for its 30-day expiration, I would definitely see myself chatting with my parents through this program on a regular basis. I used it to hold up three colors of dresses for my Mom so she could help me decide whether tea rose, azalea or peppermint was the best shade for my sister’s wedding (we’re leaning toward tea rose). My Dad and I had a face-to-face talk about my latest job news, and I saw a New Orleans friend and her dog, Boudreaux, appear on my computer screen almost as if they were in my house.

Smile for the Camera

Vid users invite others to chat by entering the other person’s email address. For invitees to accept an invitation, they must download the Vid software, which could be a deterrent for some. Those who do download the software and start their own Vid accounts (by just entering an email and password) appear to the original inviter in a carousel-like display of their contacts’ photographed faces.

These images are taken by the Webcam when someone sets up a Vid account, rather than allowing one to select his or her own photo from elsewhere on the computer. This is one example of Vid’s nod to simplicity and fewer choices. Likewise, the carousel of friends is organized in left-to-right alphabetical order showing those who are online followed by those offline. A simple status line below each person’s face identifies them as Unavailable, Available or Busy (already in a videoconference).

Clicking on a Pic

I called someone by clicking on their photo. The video-chat screen has four buttons that change its size, hide a small-image view of yourself, pause your video feed or end the conversation.

In a few instances, I heard a steady, high-pitched chirp and so did the person on the call with me. And we occasionally heard the echo of our own voices. Logitech said this sometimes happens when both users have open-air microphones and speakers turned up at the same time. Turning the speakers down usually solves the problem.

By August, all of Logitech’s standalone Webcams will come loaded with Vid software that starts up when the Webcam is plugged in. Now, the software is only downloadable from the Web.

Logitech Vid isn’t fancy, but it works well and presents its users with a satisfying experience so they can concentrate on enjoying their conversations. But it is a shame that Logitech doesn’t offer a payment plan for people who don’t use Logitech Webcams. If it did, Vid could help many people appreciate the Webcams they might never have otherwise used.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090616/easy-way-to-log-in-face-time/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090520/portfolio-lives-sort-of-web-site-adopted-by-conde-nasts-corporate-cousin/ http://allthingsd.com/20090520/portfolio-lives-sort-of-web-site-adopted-by-conde-nasts-corporate-cousin/#comments Wed, 20 May 2009 14:46:03 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=7551 Never say never: Condé Nast, which is closing down its Portfolio business magazine, has decided not to turn off the lights at Portfolio.com. Instead, it is shifting control of the Web site–essentially, the Portfolio.com address and a couple years of archived content–over to American City Business Journals, its corporate cousin in the Advance Publications family.

Plans for the move were first reported yesterday by the New York Observer.

The swap is really a testament to the power of Google (GOOG) and the long-tail theory: Even though Condé had been running Portfolio.com with a skeleton crew since the beginning of the year, the site was still generating four to five million page views a month, primarily because of search queries, says Condé Nast Group President David Carey. So that alone made Portfolio.com worth saving.

It will now serve as the central hub for ACBJ, a collection of 40 local business publications (including one I used to work for many moons ago). But it won’t just be an aggregator, insists ACBJ President Tim Bradbury. He intends to rebuild the site’s staff–he’s keeping two of the last Portfolio.com employees and intends to launch with a full-time editorial staff of five, plus freelancers–and pump out new content.

Bradbury says he’d “like to get the old band back together,” but I’m not sure exactly what that means. In the last few months of Portfolio.com’s life, the site was essentially a blogging platform for the excellent duo of Felix Salmon, who covered finance, and Jeff Bercovici, who covered media. But Salmon jumped ship for Reuters prior to the shutdown, so he’s presumably locked up. No word on Bercovici’s plans. But even if Bradbury can’t get those two back on board, I’m guessing there’s no shortage of applicants for full-time and contract slots.

Here’s the release:

New York, NY, May 20, 2009 – Portfolio.com will become part of the American City Business Journal’s bizjournals.com effective in July, it was announced today by Tim Bradbury, President, American City Business Journals, New Media, (ACBJ) and David Carey, Group President, Condé Nast. ACBJ and Condé Nast are units of Advance Publications.

Bizjournals.com will oversee both the editorial and business sides of the site. The Portfolio.com editorial team and sales staff will be based in New York. In addition to newly created content, the site will share content with other Condé Nast sites including Wired.com, GolfDigest.com, and WWD.com, as it did previously. The site will also be the home of the archives of all the popular content published by Portfolio’s print and digital properties over the last two years.

“We are excited about continuing Portfolio.com and including the site in the bizjournals network because we were impressed by Portfolio’s strong web presence, its clean and crisp design, and its voice in the business journalism marketplace,” Tim Bradbury, President, American City Business Journals, New Media said. “We believe our readers will benefit as the re-launched Portfolio.com will have a stronger focus on industry news and a greater mission to offer information relevant to today’s business professionals.”

On top of its existing strengths, Portfolio.com will be able to leverage the collaborative skills and insights of the more than 600 ACBJ business journalists around the country. The site now will have access to local market intelligence and work collaboratively with ACBJ newsrooms across the country, presenting the most important local insights through a national lens and making it unique among national business media.

“We knew that Portfolio.com was a highly valuable asset, with an established digital brand, strong direct navigation by users, and a solid long tail of traffic from content published over the past two years,” David Carey, Group President, Condé Nast said. “We saw ACBJ as a perfect match due to its great editorial resources in the business arena, and view this as a win for both Portfolio.com’s readers and the company.”

Condé Nast Portfolio magazine and its website Portfolio.com, launched in April 2007 and the magazine closed in April 2009. The site provided insight into the day’s top business stories, with analysis from bloggers and columnists. During those two years Portfolio.com grew to 2.8 million monthly uniques and won industry praise with awards such as the MIN:  Best of Web 2008, MIN: Hottest Launch of the Year 2007, WebAward: Outstanding Achievement in Website Development 2007, and Webby nominees in Best Business blog and Financial Services categories.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090520/portfolio-lives-sort-of-web-site-adopted-by-conde-nasts-corporate-cousin/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090115/when-steve-jobs-said-stay-hungry-stay-foolish-he-did-not-mean-this-foolish/ http://allthingsd.com/20090115/when-steve-jobs-said-stay-hungry-stay-foolish-he-did-not-mean-this-foolish/#comments Thu, 15 Jan 2009 10:53:21 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=8627

The restless frenzy is what is perhaps most disturbing of all about the never-ending obsessive death watch that has centered on Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

What doesn’t make your skin crawl about it?

The media and blogosphere pitifully arguing, as if it was the most important issue to face mankind ever, over who was right and who was a shill?

Apple (AAPL) being frustratingly opaque and making the bad situation worse–first by saying nothing when Jobs appeared looking disturbingly gaunt, to now releasing a series of confusing statements that don’t jibe, even if health diagnosis is always a moving target?

The rumors and innuendo about Jobs’s fate and health status swirling everywhere, pretty much all of which is pure speculation and all probably wrong?

The emotional dives in the stock, because of skittish investors, who should know by now that this is an uncertain situation–Jobs had cancer, for goodness sake–and therefore should probably tread very carefully?

And, most of all, the needless tarnishing of the reputation of a man who is one of the technology industry’s greatest icons–if not the greatest–having positively impacted the whole culture with a style and elegance that is unmatched?

That it comes at a time when he is sickly and trying to recover makes it even worse and quite sad.

That’s why BoomTown thinks it is time to listen to the wise words Jobs delivered at a now legendary Stanford University commencement address in 2005.

It was full of a lot of wonderful stories, including about his first bout with cancer. And the speech ended with some words Jobs saw on the back of “The Whole Earth Catalog” when he was young, which impacted him greatly.

They were: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

I think right about now, that foolish part has gone way too far for Jobs and the rest of us.

So let’s slow things down, shall we, and get some much-needed perspective this speech surely has (in other words, the inevitable finger-pointing and shareholder lawsuits can wait).

Here’s a video of the Jobs speech, as well as the full text after the jump.

The 2005 Jobs Stanford Commencement Address:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky–I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation–the Macintosh–a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30, I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down–that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me–I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, “Toy Story,” and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up, so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma–which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called “The Whole Earth Catalog,” which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of “The Whole Earth Catalog,” and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

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