Nothing says, ‘I love the Earth!’ quite like bringing bulldozers into an old-growth forest to create a fake ruined castle.

– Alexis Madrigal, writing in The Atlantic about the site of Sean Parker’s wedding, an unpermitted scenic construction project in a redwood grove in Big Sur which resulted in $2.5 million in penalties

Readers may click through your slideshow, but they’ll hate you a liiitttle bit more than they did when they got to the site. And I bet they’ll feel the same way about whatever advertiser was unlucky enough to get stuck on the page with some stupid thing that a reporter did with a little bit of hate in his heart and fingertips.

– The Atlantic magazine reporter Alexis Madrigal, in a story called “The Pernicious Myth That Slideshows Drive ‘Traffic’”

It’s funny that people think iPad stories generate ad revenue for media companies. That’s not how it works.

– The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal, via Twitter

The site is like a 1995 Ford Escort with a 500-horsepower advertising engine under the hood.

– Alexis Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic, describing the Drudge Report in an article entitled “Drudge Report Looks Old-School, but Its Ad Targeting Is State-of-the-Art”

Most prominently, Twitter General Counsel Alex Macgillivray called the launch a “bad day for the Internet.” Though obviously his loyalties lie with Twitter, it’s a particularly notable charge given “Amac” was previously a lawyer for Google.

Bad day for the Internet. bit.ly/Am5bqz Having been there, I can imagine the dissension @Google to search being warped this way.

— Alex Macgillivray (@amac) January 10, 2012

Macgillivray linked to a blog post by John Battelle (who wrote the book “The Search” about Google) that said, “Ick. Remember when Google used to be a neutral player that crawled the Whole Dern Web? So sad to see that era pass.”

Elsewhere, pro-blogger-turned-VC MG Siegler waved the antitrust flag, while NYU law professor James Grimmelmann wrote, “Today is a good day to turn off Google+ and delete your Google Profile. I just did.”

Alexis Madrigal of the Atlantic added, “I just can’t help but wonder whether Google’s new social mission and the original Google mission will keep coming into conflict. And in the race to protect its flank from Facebook, Google will lose track of why we loved them in the first place.”

Google is now encouraging users to "upgrade to Google+"

When I asked Google yesterday about why it didn’t include services like Facebook and Google in search, Google Fellow Ben Gomes replied, “The key thing here is we only have access to content on Google. We’re open to other types of content, but in order to provide secure and consistent access, we can only provide what’s in Google, where we know the privacy settings and have the relevant graph and signals.”

As for the actual “Search plus Your World” features that Google promised today for English-speaking users of Google.com, they don’t seem to be available yet for many people. However, Google is already promoting the feature on its U.S. home page, and prompting people who click through to “Upgrade to Google+.” (Having a Google+ account isn’t required for the new personal search features, but obviously it enhances the experience.)

Asked for a timetable for the launch, a Google spokesperson said, “It started rolling out this morning and will roll out to everyone over the next couple days.” She did not give an estimate for how many users have the features so far.

Update: Twitter Complains About Google Giving Preference to Google+ Content

The company will soon give all users the option to use Facebook entirely over HTTPS, and recommends they do so if they use public Internet access points. It will also show members social captchas for authentication–where they must identify a few of their Facebook friends’ faces–whenever suspicious activity is detected on an account.

Facebook warned in a blog post that using HTTPS will slow down the site and isn’t compatible with all features, including some externally developed Facebook applications. It will roll out HTTPS access “slowly over the next few weeks” via its settings page, the company said.

Facebook still faces other ongoing security problems, such as spam, virus messages and wall posts. CTO Bret Taylor said yesterday the company had cut platform spam by 95 percent in 2010, but I believe he was referring to notifications and posts from applications, especially social games. Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s public fan page was apparently hacked into yesterday and has since been taken down.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.