Online influence measurement site Klout got $8.5 million in new funding, led by Kleiner Perkins from its socially focused sFund.

Kleiner’s wack-tastic venture partner Bing Gordon will join the board.

Greycroft Partners is also participating in this round, as well as some of its initial angel investors.

So far, the San Francisco-based start-up–which tries to measure influence across the social Web–has raised $10 million in total.

Here is Klout’s blog post and also its official press release:

Taking Klout to the Next Level

January 10th, 2011 by Joe Fernandez

Every day here at Klout HQ we are humbled by the passion people have for their Klout Scores, the amazing ways our API is being utilized and the innovative brands that leverage Klout to connect with influencers. We can’t thank you enough for your support. We are obsessed with helping the world understand the power of influence and I am proud to announce that we have added some key partners that are as passionate about this mission as we are. We have closed an $8.5m round of funding with Kleiner Perkins leading as part of the sFund and with participation from Greycroft Partners.

Measuring influence across the social web is a monumental task. Kleiner Perkins is the firm you turn to when your goal is to change the world. As part of the sFund, we look forward to working closely with many of the companies that define the social web. The team here at Klout is thrilled to have Bing Gordon from Kleiner Perkins joining our board of directors.

Greycroft Partners is also a critical new partner for us. Greycroft offers unique insight and connections with the media and advertising world. As we continue to experiment with connecting brands and influencers this will be a big help. We are also proud to have many of our angel investors participating including ff Asset Management, Tom McInerney, Paige Craig, Bobby Yazdani and Howard Lindzon.

This new funding will be used to continue to expand our engineering team (if you want to build something awesome, come join us!). Providing accurate, understandable and actionable data about influence is the kind of challenge we love, but we have a lot of work to do here still. With this money we will be adding even more services beyond Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to the Klout algorithm. We are also investing heavily in the Klout consumer experience to help the people who influence us the most, our users, better understand and leverage their social capital.

Personally, I look forward to devoting more time to our community. The Klout Score is quickly becoming the standard measurement for online influence. We love the passionate debate that influence invokes. To us, influence is the ability to drive actions. The way influence is measured and applied is going to continue to evolve at an ever-increasing pace. Fundamentally, we believe in the power of the individual and I think it’s critical for us to continue to offer transparency and open communication with the community as Klout evolves.

Thank you again for your support! There is a lot of hard work still to come but we are incredibly excited about the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Klout Raises $8.5 Million to Enable Everyone to Understand and Leverage their Influence

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, January 10, 2011–Klout, the leader in online influence measurement, announced today that it has raised $8.5 million in a funding round led by the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer (KPCB) sFund™ and participation from Greycroft Partners. Prominent angel investors, including ff Asset Management, Paige Craig, Howard Lindzon, Thomas McInerney, Bobby Yazdani, and others, also participated in the round, which brings Klout’s funding to more than $10 million to date.

“It’s been amazing seeing the passion the social media community has for their Klout Scores,” says Joe Fernandez, CEO and co-founder of Klout. “We have a lot of work ahead of us, though. We intend to invest heavily in increasing the performance of our system to deliver the accuracy, clarity and actionability commensurate with being the standard for influence. To do so, we will need to greatly expand the number of services that are analyzed in calculating the Klout Score and provide a much richer consumer experience.

KPCB partner William “Bing” Gordon, a preeminent visionary on the future of the social web, will join Joe Fernandez, John Frankel and Allen Morgan as a member of Klout’s board of directors.

“People are hungry to get even more meaning from their daily social media use, and Klout is creating an important and new standard measure of relevance.” Says Gordon. “I hope everyone who reads this shares this message so my Klout score goes up!”

“In a very short period, Klout has established itself as a generic noun in the lexicon of the web,” says Alan Patricof, managing director and founder of Greycroft. “We believe Klout will continue to grow and be the standard measurement of influence.”

However, added sources, Google is fighting hard to counter the Twitter offer, so Pichai could easily stay with his current employer. At Google, which he joined in April 2004, Pichai is a VP of Product Management.

If successful, the hiring of Pichai would be a major raid for Twitter, and mark its place next to Facebook as an up-and-comer in the race to entice away top Google executives.

More importantly, Twitter could use the product help.

The San Francisco microblogging company, which just raised a massive funding, has done relatively little product development recently, in large part because its focus has been absorbed by overwhelming growth and infrastructure problems.

Pichai certainly fits the bill as a head of product for Twitter, given his job at Google. The well-regarded tech exec heads the Silicon Valley search giant’s high-profile Chrome browser and Chrome OS efforts.

Pichai was front and center at an unveiling of Chrome OS plans in November, and touted the Chrome browser’s 40 million users only a year after its debut in 2009.

But not everyone is so sanguine. Paul Buchheit, founder of Gmail (and FriendFeed) predicted a very short life for Google’s still-in-beta Chrome OS, noting–on Twitter in December–that he thought the product would be axed or fused with Android in 2011.

As Mobilized’s Ina Fried wrote at the time:

Google originally hoped to have Chrome OS-based computers for sale this year, but has run into some delays. Last week, the company released a beta version of the software and distributed to testers an unbranded laptop running the operating system. However, it’s worth noting that in doing so, Google has hardly made the strongest hardware case for the operating system, using a relatively bulky netbook with a reliable, but hardly power-sipping Intel Atom processor.

The idea of merging the two operating systems has some merit. Doing so would pair a top-notch browser with an ecosystem that already has a lot of applications and developers.

For now, the operating systems are distinct, with Android running hundreds of thousands of applications and used largely on phones, along with a few tablets, such as Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. However, Google VP Andy Rubin confirmed after his appearance at last week’s D: Dive Into Mobile that the company is working on a new version of Android, known as Honeycomb, that is geared exclusively to tablets. (The full video of Rubin’s onstage appearance was posted on our site earlier today.)

Acer and a couple of other hardware makers have said they plan to do Chrome OS netbooks next year once the software is ready.

If hired, Pichai would fill an open spot left by the departure of longtime Twitter VP of Product Jason Goldman, who stepped down at the beginning of December.

The attempt to bring on Pichai to lead product brings into question former CEO Evan Williams’s role at the company. When he stepped down as CEO, Williams said it was in order to focus on product strategy, and when Goldman gave up his position, many assumed Williams was the natural substitute.

While Pichai would be a strong choice for the job, he has not been an active user of the product.

Until recently, that is.

Pichai’s own Twitter account has a grand total of 118 tweets, with about a third of them posted in the last month.

Yesterday, in an interview with BoomTown’s Kara Swisher at D@CES, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said some product goals for Twitter included a better experience for passive users and a more “agnostic” experience across platforms.

Costolo also mentioned a new zero tolerance policy for infrastructure problems, and said that Twitter does not consider itself a “platform company,” but rather one that has APIs.

The Google-Twitter connection is strong, and not just on the we-want-to-buy-you front–Google has often cast its acquisitive eyes at Twitter and still does.

And many Twitter employees were formerly Googlers, although not all in the same era or area.

Costolo himself came to Twitter after being at Google, which had acquired his last start-up, FeedBurner.

Other former Googlers include many on Twitter’s product team, such as Othman Laraki and Elad Gil, who were product managers at Google Mobile Maps and Google Toolbar before joining Twitter through its acquisition of their geo start-up Mixer Labs.

In addition, last year, Twitter nabbed Google lawyer Alexander Macgillivray as its general counsel.

And, of course, Twitter co-founders Williams and Biz Stone had worked at Google after it bought Blogger. They created Twitter after they left the company.

It’s possible that Pichai leaving Google might have something to do with the company favoring the Android mobile operating system over Chrome OS, but seems more likely that the Twitter role would just be a compelling opportunity for him.

Twitter declined comment, and Google has not responded to an inquiry about Pichai.

Until this nail-biting talent raid has a resolution, here’s a video of Pichai talking at the Web 2.0 Summit in 2009:

Gil Elbaz, the man who in 2003 sold a start-up called Applied Semantics (now known as AdSense) to Google, has what he thinks is the solution. His latest effort is Factual, and it attracted a $25 million round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures with SV Angel and former Disney president Michael Ovitz participating. Ben Horowitz and Danny Rimer are joining Factual’s board of directors.

I caught up with Elbaz by phone yesterday to talk about the vision of Factual and his plans to grow the company.

NewEnterprise: So at a high level, what is Factual and what do you intend to do?

Gil Elbaz: We see this as an emerging category. We think of it as a data platform that offers data and data services to all sorts of developers, to build cooler, more innovative applications more quickly, especially when it comes to apps that are data-driven. Finding the right vendor for that data, and then integrating it, then managing and maintaining that data is costly and expensive. Developers can move that much more quickly by tapping into our knowledge base. We’re marketing certain verticals where our data is really good. We’re putting some extra marketing muscle behind our places database.

NE: Give me a use case. How might someone use the platform?

GE: Our places database is a good example where we’re getting quite a bit of traction. What we’ve done is built one of the most comprehensive databases of business listings and points of interest. This data is easy to browse, and it’s complete. It contains address and phone and contact info and latitude and longitude. If you want to a build a new service like Yelp or Foursquare, or something that relies on knowing what’s in close proximity, a mobile app can make a simple API call, send over the current GPS coordinate and fulfill the request very quickly. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what we can do, but it’s making serious waves because it is very hard to get that data, especially if you’re going mobile. It’s very hard to get that good data for locations around the world.

NE: Do you have other datasets?

GE: We’re being market driven and being focused on that because that’s what our customers have been asking for. But we do have others. We have data from other vertical segments like health and entertainment. In the area of education we built a database of high schools that Newsweek magazine uses in their fairly important annual ranking of high schools. They not only use the data that we were able to generate and build, but they were also able to benefit from our crowdsourcing API, so that their users get not only a more engaging experience but the great partnership comes back into our central database, so the information can be improved. That’s a nice virtuous circle that makes us confident that our data is going to keep getting better because of these partnerships.

NE: I’m trying to come up with a metaphor, and the closest thing I can think of is data–information–as a utility supplier of data. If I want to build an application that contains a lot of data, I can come to you for the data I want to use so I don’t have to go out and gather it myself. Is that fair?

GE: I think that’s a pretty good metaphor. It’s really the access that’s important. When you use our pipe you’re going to know that you’re getting good data, that’s up to date and that we stand behind it, and that other people are participating to make it better, and update it, and that you can get it quickly. Looking ahead, there’s going to be times when it’s not strictly our data. Sometimes it will be data that has been uploaded from other people or from people in the community who want to take advantage of the data platform. So it’s really the pipes and the platform that we’re building that make this kind of data and sharing possible.

NE: You sold your first company to Google. The issue came up that you don’t need the funds. You could fund this on your own. Explain why you sought funding.

GE: I did fund the company for a little while. But I knew that our mission is very audacious and in order to become the ubiquitous data layer for the Internet, to be the obvious place that a developer would go to first to get data into their application, it’s a huge, tall order, and something that’s going to take a lot of technology and marketing effort and strategic guidance. The types of people that we brought in on our angel round and then the people we’re bringing onto the board have a lot of operational experience. Also, you never know when an idea is so big that you want to raise money down the line. If you want to do that it makes sense to build bridges with the financial community as early as possible, in case it does become a more capital-intensive business. This is a new category and we feel like we have a good understanding of it, and things can change quickly, and if it does, we want to be positioned with a good team who can help us navigate the different opportunities that will certainly arise.

NE: So now that you’ve landed the funding, what’s the first order of business?

GE: The challenge is always scaling correctly and quickly. I think we’re positioned well for this. We have a humming machine here. The management team is in place and we’ve been working on this for a few years now. And we have a great culture in place with people who are really passionate about making data available. However, hiring the engineering talent is taking up a huge amount of time. That’s the number one thing on my priority list for the short term.

NE: How do you find the best engineers? Is there a trick to it?

GE: I’d have to say that having worked at Google for three and-a-half years was the perfect place to learn what a deep and strong engineering culture was all about. I also got a lot of hiring experience at Google’s Santa Monica office. I don’t think there’s one trick. I think there are signals that a person is not just looking for a job, but for an opportunity to make extremely important intellectual contributions. And also I’m looking for people who want to make contributions not just to a project but to the world. You look for quick thinking and passion, and a history of doing things beyond what the job requires. I love it when I see people who have contributed to open-source projects on their own time. That demonstrates that they’re trying to contribute to society but also that they like working on important tools that make a difference.

Tucker is a 13-year veteran of Sun Microsystems whose last job was as Sun’s CTO of cloud computing. He was also VP of the AppExchange at Salesforce.com. He’s also known for “Lew’s Law,” which he describes as more of an informal observation about how far the cost of computing can realistically fall.

I caught up with him last week in New York City to talk about what Cisco, long the powerhouse of networking, plans to do in the cloud.

NewEnterprise: First off, what is Lew’s Law?

Lew Tucker: It’s just an observation, not a real law, that the price of computing will never be free, because it requires energy to compute. Computing is really about changing the state of physical bits, and that requires energy. It’s great that we’re driving the costs down. Moore’s Law is hammering the costs. But there is a lower limit. Right now the dominant cost is around managing software, operations and everything else. So we can take a lot of those costs out through automation.

NewEnterprise: When I think of Cisco I think of industrial-strength routers and switches. How do you get from there to cloud computing?

LT: Eight months ago I thought the same thing. I was with Sun for many years and then left to go to Salesforce.com to do software as a service. I became very enamored of the Salesforce model. I came back to Sun to build the Sun Cloud, which was to be a direct competitor to Amazon Web Services. I was an Amazon user myself and I loved how you could so easily spin up as many servers as you wanted without having to buy them, configure them and so on. Building a cloud is another thing entirely. When Cisco called me, I said to them, “You’re about routers and switches and I’m all about complex distributed computing systems.” And Cisco said they were really about networking and making distributed systems. I started digging into it and realized there was a really unique position at Cisco if you think of cloud computing as a fully automated system with different elements. Some of those are networking elements, and some of those are integrated boxes with computing and storage and networking all in one. Some are networking services.

NewEnterprise: When you think about how cloud computing works, you really can’t do anything without fast connections between one system or another, which is something that Cisco knows very well.

LT: The network has always been a shared piece of infrastructure. There are a lot of different applications running on different servers that are trying to reach either each other or their endpoints. So there’s an awful lot that’s going into the network to make that happen in a fair and efficient way.

NewEnterprise: So what hardware is Cisco building here?

LT: We build pre-integrated compute, storage and networking that we’re calling our Unified Computing Systems. You can buy a rack of these systems, and they’re driven by a set of APIs [application programming interfaces]. We’re not alone in that. Hewlett-Packard does something similar. Then the customers add in their own preferred storage environment, like EMC or NetApp, or they can build their own.

NewEnterprise: What kind of use cases are you seeing in companies? What are your customers asking for right now?

LT: Right now what they are asking about is collaboration services, the integration of video and voice and calendaring and messaging. We’ve seen consumer services like Facebook change what people expect at the office. We have a collaboration product called Quad that looks just like Facebook. WebEx is a Cisco service. We’re working on offering that as both a hosted form and one that runs inside the customer’s own environment.

NewEnterprise: So there are a lot of cloud providers out there already–Amazon, Google and Microsoft, which has its Azure platform. They’ve already deployed their services and have relationships with vendors. How do you see the market shaping up, and what is Cisco’s place in it?

LT: I think there’s going to be two or three large cloud providers, but then there will be many smaller ones who specialize in delivering specialized services. Take health care. In that industry, groups of companies are going to get together and offer a HIPAA-compliant cloud. You’ll also see something similar happen around financial services. Those are two industries that have very specific needs. The cloud will be dominated by a few large providers for sure, but there will also be many specialty cloud providers.

NewEnterprise: You’ve been on the job about six months. What have you learned so far?

LT: I’ve learned that there’s an amazing amount of technology within Cisco. It has the largest concentration of network engineers in the world. Part of my job is to go and align our products and roadmaps with this future world that we’re moving into and to uncover a lot of the new approaches to how we solve different networking problems. I’m an engineer, and I like nothing better than being in a room with a bunch of other engineers with a whiteboard as they all battle it out. I’ve also learned that building cloud infrastructure is a lot harder than everyone thought.

Making browsers social is a hot project these days. The Facebook-framed RockMelt browser, made by and backed by some of the people responsible for Netscape, launched to much fanfare earlier this month. However, it seems to me completely crazy that someone could launch a “social browser” in this day and age without a mobile component.

Skyfire helps fill that mobile-social gap with some nifty uses of the Facebook API. There are two notable new buttons in the browser, which are prominently displayed despite the small size of a mobile screen.

First, users can click from any Web page to see global popular Facebook Likes for that domain. So in the example portrayed in this demo video, you can see all the recent articles on the New York Times ranked by how much they are being shared by people on Facebook. This is similar to what many companies are doing around analyzing links shared on Twitter (for instance, I wrote about Gravity last week), but it’s rarer to see global analysis of Facebook. A spokesperson for Skyfire said this is based on public Facebook APIs, not a deeper partnership like what Bing has for its social search.

The other new Skyfire button is called “Fireplace,” and it’s a custom newsfeed for any user with only status updates from friends who included shared links. This is somewhat similar to what folks like Flipboard are doing, but without the fancy design. Fireplace breaks out a simple list of what your friends are reading and sharing so you can quickly flip through what they think is interesting.

The Skyfire Facebook edition also includes integration with Twitter and Amazon.

Boulder-based Gnip (the name is “ping” spelled backward) is a middleman between social media sites and social media monitoring companies. The company has raised about $5 million from Foundry Group, SoftTech VC and First Round Capital. Customers include Alterian, Next Big Sound and Attensity.

“The various levels from Twitter have always been confusing and scattered and unofficial, and it’s always been real shaky ground when you work with them,” said Gnip CEO Jud Valeski in a phone interview today. “Nothing against Twitter, it’s just the realities of growing a service that strong and that fast.”

To date, Twitter has offered a paid level (Firehose), a 10 percent sample level to approved developers (Gardenhose) and a 1 percent level to everybody (Spritzer). It doesn’t publicly disclose pricing for the Firehose, but charges different amounts based on how big a company is and what it’s doing with the data.

The new Gnip feeds are only for a certain type of data usage: Analytics and monitoring. Customers must not display the data publicly, but rather use it internally for their own customers–for example, to measure how social media users respond to a Coca-Cola advertising campaign.

Gnip will offer the Halfhose (50 percent of Tweets at a cost of $30,000 per month), the Decahose (10 percent of Tweets for $5,000 per month) and the Mentionhose (all mentions of a user including @replies and re-Tweets for $20,000 per month). All feeds are available in original JSON and Activity Streams JSON formats.

Analytics providers who were previously using Twitter’s Gardenhose for free will now have to start paying Gnip for the Decahose. Twitter has also said it’s planning its own free lightweight analytics product, but that’s not out yet.

Some more background from my previous story:

What does it cost to drink from the Firehose? That depends. Twitter’s pricing plans appear to vary wildly, from the big search companies on down to folks prototyping a brainstorm. Multiple Twitter developers told me they felt Twitter’s pricing seemed to be totally arbitrary, and based on whatever Twitter thought they’d be able to pay.

Twitter business development guy Doug Williams said it’s true that Twitter has no structured way to price access between the 10 percent of the Gardenhose and the 100 percent of the Firehose, though the company is likely to develop more levels of pricing.

“Twitter is focused on creating consumer products and we’re not built to license data,” Williams said, adding, “Twitter has always invested in the ecosystem and startups and we believe that a lot of innovation can happen on top of the data. Pricing and terms definitely vary by where you are from a corporate perspective.”

It’s not only how big you are, but what you do with the data. According to a developer, analytics players are asked to pay the most, because they take Twitter content but don’t contribute it or drive content to Twitter. Those who display and process content in a way that drives traffic pay less, and those who help generate content pay the least. As I understand it, some developers who make Twitter clients don’t pay anything at all for streaming API access.

Image courtesy Minnesota National Guard on Picasa.

But different Twitter developers have different needs for Twitter data, and different abilities to pay. The company has adopted a graded approach to allow developers access to its users’ tweets. Don’t have the big bucks to pay for the Firehose? Sign up for the cleverly named Gardenhose access level, which gets you 10 percent of public statuses for free but requires case-by-case approval by Twitter. Just want to get in and start playing around without waiting to be whitelisted? Try the Spritzer, which is available to any user and provides roughly 1 percent of public statuses.

(According to folks at Twitter, the awesome naming convention is the handiwork of tech lead John Kalucki. Also, the Gardenhose and Spritzer used to have a stronger spray, as it were; developers could previously get as much as 20 percent of tweets for free. But now that Twitter’s up to 95 million tweets per day, that portion was getting too big.)

What does it cost to drink from the Firehose? That depends. Twitter’s pricing plans appear to vary wildly, from the big search companies on down to folks prototyping a brainstorm. Multiple Twitter developers told me they felt Twitter’s pricing seemed to be totally arbitrary, and based on whatever Twitter thought they’d be able to pay.

Twitter business development guy Doug Williams said it’s true that Twitter has no structured way to price access between the 10 percent of the Gardenhose and the 100 percent of the Firehose, though the company is likely to develop more levels of pricing.

“Twitter is focused on creating consumer products and we’re not built to license data,” Williams said, adding, “Twitter has always invested in the ecosystem and startups and we believe that a lot of innovation can happen on top of the data. Pricing and terms definitely vary by where you are from a corporate perspective.”

It’s not only how big you are, but what you do with the data. According to a developer, analytics players are asked to pay the most, because they take Twitter content but don’t contribute it or drive content to Twitter. Those who display and process content in a way that drives traffic pay less, and those who help generate content pay the least. As I understand it, some developers who make Twitter clients don’t pay anything at all for streaming API access.

As of July, Twitter said it had given 15-20 developers/product access to the Firehose; the company declined to disclose the current number.

Twitter is also supposedly going to soon start giving away a free analytics dashboard for brands and other users. It’s not clear how much that will compete with existing premium Twitter analytics products that other companies offer.

Williams described the Gardenhose as something academics might use to do research, but I’ve talked to at least one company that makes a mobile app that displays topical Twitter content and feels the free Gardenhose is good enough for its needs. And it’s the right price.

If developers need something more specific than a random sampling of statuses, they can also access filtered content through the streaming API–for instance, tracking keywords, following user IDs and returning tweets from a specific location. There’s also a three-level partner program there. The base level for filtering by user ID is “default,” followed by the approval-required “shadow” and the paying-partner level “birddog,” said Williams. I prefer the cute stream metaphors.

Image courtesy Minnesota National Guard on Picasa.

Vurve (formerly called Palaran) is almost all automated (customers have to put in about 15 minutes per week, the company says), and to start it is focused on e-commerce businesses. The company figures out what combination of search, display, remarketing, social and shopping engine advertising will be most effective on a dynamic basis.

A partnership with Shopify gives Vurve access to more than 10,000 stores, and it is also available through an integration with Yahoo. Customers spend a minimum of $200 per month. Vurve has also scored preferred access to Google and Facebook’s APIs so it can create its ads more easily. As you can see in the image above, the company does a neat job of illustrating where every sale actually comes from.

Vurve founder and CEO Amit Kumar said that though he doesn’t see much direct competition now, he expects there to be a demand-side platform-style gold rush for optimization and data mining. “Anyone can do this; it’s not voodoo science,” he said. Vurve has had a year in stealth to get its product ready and also has a strong team. Kumar previously worked on Yahoo SearchMonkey, and was also at Dapper, which was acquired by Yahoo last month. Vurve recently hired Kent Brewster, formerly a well-known Yahoo engineer, who apparently “singlehandedly” built the Netflix iPhone app.

Vurve raised $1.2 million from True Ventures and is based in Sunnyvale, Calif.

BoomTown arrived late to the Facebook mobile event for the press due to traffic related to the parade today for the San Francisco Giants’ World Series victory–and where I would much rather be right now.

Go Giants!

10:53 am PT: In any case, I am here in the cafeteria of Facebook again, where the company continues its attempts to take over the known digital universe before Google does.

Currently, the social networking giant notes “200 million people around the world are now actively using Facebook from a phone, more than triple the number just one year ago.”

Thus, some new tries of a lot of stuff, such as single sign-on.

Meaning you sign on a Facebook and it signs you on all over the Web (or at least at those in partnership with the company).

Such as at Groupon and Zynga.

This single sign-on stuff has been tried by many before, a kind of Holy Grail of the Web, and where everyone has failed.

But it also the proverbial camel’s nose poking in your digital tent.

As in, the whole Facebook body is surely coming in next.

Facebook’s exec in charge of all this, Eric Tseng, talks about a virtuous circle of single sign-on, happy users and happy developers, sounding as if this is the single biggest problem facing humanity.

A password crisis! Silicon Valley to the rescue!

Perhaps the only issue the now damaged administration of President Barack Obama could actually get some legislation passed on now.

“My fellow Americans, we have too long be stuck in a miasma of forgetting which name of our dog we used for our password plus the number one…”

How much do I want to be at Giants parade right now? Much!

11:02 am: Next, we move onto more ability to show your location to friends on Facebook better and make sense of it by opening location APIs.

More heavy pontificating about what a disaster it is that we cannot properly see where our friends are on Facebook in the real world.

Of course, this leaves out the pertinent point that my “friends” on Facebook are exactly those I do not want to run into at the Starbucks on El Camino Real in Palo Alto, Calif.

Loopt Founder Sam Altman comes up to show off the integration with Facebook Places, where this problem is solved anyway.

“We believe data wants to be unified,” says Altman.

Certainly if you are the Borg, you want it to be unified. Me, not so much.

11:11 am: Now comes the attempted Groupon-killer from Facebook, which is creatively called “Deals.”

This is essentially allowing Facebook Places to locate a person and then merchants to offer deals when a user is nearby via a platform offered by Facebook.

You can do individual deals, such as getting a beer at a bar when you check in. Then, there is a loyalty deal on the phone, taking the place of that dog-eared card you always lose.

And there is the “friend deal.” This is not friends with benefits, sadly.

It means if you check in and bring a lot of folks, one eats free–which sounds just a little naughty.

Also, there is one deal type related to charity.

For the Gap, for example, you get a free jeans if you are among the first 10,000 to check in at a Gap store. There are 500 million Facebook users, so you do the math.

Essentially, it is about getting stuff if you check in, including experiences.

So, just like little white mice in Facebook’s lab, we push the button, we get the cheese. Sigh.

But I wonder if I check in right now, I can be transported to the Giants parade via a time machine. Now that might be something worth handing over my privacy to Facebook.

“The big takeaway for today is that there is obviously a lot of change in the social space,” says Facebook CEO and Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. “You can rethink any product area and make it be social.”

Indeed, you can. And Facebook obviously is going to be plowing on through a lot of them in order to solidify its stranglehold on the consumer.

11:23 am: Q&A!

The first question is on privacy and third-party developers giving up your location.

Yes, that!

Zuckerberg makes assurances that the current privacy steps now in place are working just fine and also users need to consent.

“The place information about people is not public,” he says.

There is question from Ben Parr of Mashable, about whether there is an iPad app for Facebook coming.

“It’s not mobile…it is a computer,” declares Zuckerberg, dismissing the very good question.

“I think Apple would disagree with you,” countered Parr, correctly.

“Well, sorry,” said Zuckerberg with more than a little bit of snark.

For a second, he sounds just like the guy from the Facebook movie.

But Zuckerberg quickly declares his love of Apple products and apologizes, although he should not have as it was a funny exchange.

A question about single sign-on. Zuckerberg notes that it has been tried, but the experience was bad.

“What we think is going to happen now is that it is so easy when it works, it is a whole different experience,” he said, comparing it to the way YouTube made video uploading on the Web easier.

Zuckerberg’s goal is that all apps become social, which is also a virtuous circle for Facebook, of course.

A question about the deals offer. It seems for Zuckerberg that Facebook is not getting a cut from retailers right now, as Groupon does.

Ruh-roh, Andrew Mason!

Zuckerberg then notes that the Places offering is going well, without giving a lot of specifics.

At the end, PR maven Brandee Barker wraps it up by saying what I have been thinking this entire time:

“Go Giants!”

In contrast to its success elsewhere, Facebook has so far failed to establish itself as Japan’s most popular social-networking site. The company, with headquarters in Palo Alto, California, has thus decided to launch a cross-platform feature that will allow users of Facebook and Mixi, a popular Japanese social-networking site, to link to each other’s profiles. This also allows users to share links, videos and photos.

“We built this application using Mixi’s standard APIs available for all developers. Through this application, we hope to simplify connecting and sharing with friends across different social platforms,” said Facebook spokeswoman Kumiko Hidaka, adding that Facebook has similar applications in place with other internet services, including Twitter.

This is not an official partnership between the two companies. Instead Facebook has taken advantage of a new platform developed by Mixi last month that would allow its users to share information with other internet services. However, this new feature could raise Facebook’s profile in Japan where it has struggled to win over users from local rivals like Mixi and Gree. There are currently about 21 million registered users on Mixi while Facebook boasts over 500 million members world-wide. Facebook, which launched its Japan version in 2008, declined to disclose user statistics by country.

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