People who want to plan a road trip or organize a book group can ask their friends to join a Zwiggo group and it will last as long as needed for that specific purpose and gathering of people.

Zwiggo is an independent alternative to Facebook Groups that’s also somewhat similar to other tools like Fridge (acquired by Google and no longer available) and Orchestra (a social to-do list app). The company has set itself up as a platform where users create a public or private group and then add apps like chat, calendars, photos, maps and decision making. Other people can also make new apps through a Zwiggo API.

That sounds like an awful lot to bite off for a start-up — and Zwiggo is a tiny one. The entire platform was built by Amsterdam-based Maurice Sykkink with the help of a couple designers, a few app developers and a co-founder who writes copy or whatever else needs doing. Sykkink said he’s not trying to raise or make money yet — he first wants to see if people like what he’s doing.

Although he later clarified, “I wasn’t making a value judgment,” maintaining multiple identities, whether it’s as simple as publishing some photos to Picasa and others to Facebook, is becoming a big trend in online life.

Even as Zuckerberg’s Facebook extended its dominance in 2010 to the point where it seems to have a social Web monopoly, it was still a landmark year for social network competition.

Where in the past, tech industry watchers derided new start-ups for launching “yet another social network,” ever more users seem to be constructing multiple online presences that utilize the strengths of various platforms and networks.

And this splintered approach is only going to increase.

Internet users now have plenty of outlets for self-expression. They can prioritize individuality and choose to post on the highly customizable Tumblr, or instead value the comprehensiveness of a network and post on the blander Facebook.

A big part of this shift toward understanding the private online self versus the public online self has been the rise of Twitter. On Twitter, regular users make the sort of decisions celebrities do: What to share about their private lives with their public audience of followers.

Another shift has been the rise of smartphones, along with their quality broadband connections, good cameras and mobile apps.

As an early adopter of various social apps, I’ve recently been confronted with the choice of whether to post a picture taken with my Apple iPhone on-the-go to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Path or Picplz.

Each of them has different audiences, different associations with my personal or professional identities, and different expectations for how people will view and interact with my snapshot. (And I suppose there’s also the option of keeping the pictures to myself on my phone storage.)

Although the people noisiest about privacy on Facebook have at times been the media, publicity of the company’s highly confusing privacy settings seems to have led to many more people being aware of them and perhaps even changing them.

Perhaps that’s why I see an increasing–but still quite small–portion of my Facebook friends using pseudonyms on the service. And when I asked them why, I heard a variety of reasons.

One is a teacher, another prefers to go by the moniker he uses artistically. Yet another is a college student who is applying for jobs and who wants to be more anonymous for a while. Like many of today’s young people, she has become highly conscious of balancing the freedom to be herself online with the way she is perceived by professional contacts.

(A representative for Facebook declined to comment on whether the company has recently been more permissive about allowing pseudonyms, something it has traditionally frowned on.)

Of course, very little of what’s posted online can be trusted to never get out or never be linked to its originator. If you really want to keep your thoughts private and impermanent, of course, keep them in your head.

But there are now many more options for more private communication, many of them having first come out in 2010. They include small-group coordination tools like GroupMe, Fast Society and Beluga. There’s also Path, a start-up from a former Facebooker that is perhaps too limited by design, but is exploring the world of more intimate and personal communications.

For many people, their Facebook network is far from a direct match with their real-world friends, so it will be increasingly important to use these tools to dice circles up and make them more accessible. (Facebook is also trying to address that need with its own Groups tool.)

To be sure, that Facebook map of connections is a highly valuable asset, one the company has fiercely protected, as Google reformulates its approach to the social Web.

Splitting your users into an entirely new social graph will certainly hamper growth. For instance, another early Facebooker launched Jumo, a social network for people connecting with nonprofits that seems to risk being redundant with, and isolated from, similar efforts on other platforms.

And Foursquare, despite its zeitgeisty innovation for sharing real-time location updates, has accumulated only about five million users in the last two years.

However, the speedy growth of new social networks like the addictive Instagram–which is like Twitter for pictures and got one million users in its first two months–shows that there’s still an opportunity to take an independent path.

What seems particularly notable about the current moment is that many people are evolving their approach to expressing themselves online, and they now have many tools and contexts to do so. And it’s up to them if these multiple identities will be unified anywhere except in their heads.

(Image collage at top of post courtesy Flickr user shannonkringen.)

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

The move is especially interesting because Adams had prepared an influential slide deck about the shortcomings of today’s social networks that was widely circulated online as well as within Facebook. Originally presented at the Voices That Matter Web Design Conference in June, “The Real Life Social Network” has been viewed more than 400,000 times since being posted on SlideShare.

For Adams to join the opposition is obviously not a vote of confidence for Google and its much-maligned plans to offer more social products.

Adams, who had spent four years on the Google user experience team, didn’t specify what his new gig at Facebook will be. At Google he had worked on products such as Gmail, Latitude and YouTube, according to his bio. Adams is also the author of the forthcoming book “Social Circles.”

After seeing Adams’s tweet this afternoon, I took some time to replay his 224-slide presentation.

In the last five months, Facebook released a Groups feature that addresses some of the problems Adams identified in online social networking, but his ideas and principles have not gone stale. Adams’s main thesis is that online social networks have not evolved to accurately portray and extend the offline social networks people have had forever. He compares Facebook friend lists and IM chat contacts to the awkwardness of planning a wedding seating chart, where people from all parts of your life come together.

While tools like email exist to help people communicate with those they are most strongly tied to, and services like Facebook help us keep track of our “weak ties,” Adams speaks of a need for a third model of “temporary ties” that recede after a short-term period, like an eBay transaction. He also talks about the opportunity to capitalize on the high degree of influence that friends have on each other’s purchases.

Adams proposes that people will increasingly need to have more than one online profile, and that online social products must be designed with privacy and trust at top of mind. He says well-designed social products must communicate to users the consequences of their actions.

These are interesting principles, but they’re hardly a blueprint for Google’s long-awaited social offerings and upgrades. The big difference is that now Facebookers can go straight to the source rather than being a few of the 400,000 people to view Adams’s ideas and research online.

Please note: As disclosed in my ethics statement, my husband is a part-time researcher on the Facebook user experience team.

Bret Taylor

But there’s also a pattern emerging for what happens to that talent once folks arrive at Facebook. Acqhired CEOs hold prominent roles on Facebook’s product team; nearly every recent Facebook product launch seems to have been led by an acqhired employee. Most recently, Facebook Messages was product-managed by Dan Hsiao, who joined the company with the FriendFeed acquisition. Hsiao had actually been a more junior member of the FriendFeed team, having started there as an intern in 2008. Now he is managing what Facebook called the largest engineering team it has ever put together for a launch.

Meanwhile, former FriendFeed CEO Bret Taylor is CTO of Facebook. Hot Potato CEO Justin Shaffer was product manager for Facebook Groups and is now product manager for the company’s Places and Events products (his company was only acquired in August). Divvyshot CEO Sam Odio is now product manager for Facebook Photos. Nextstop CEO Carl Sjogreen now holds the title “head of platform development,” according to a Facebook spokeperson.

And Gokul Rajaram, known for his seminal work as a product manager on Google AdSense, is now in charge of Facebook’s ad technology. Rajaram came to Facebook through the acquisition of his company Chai Labs, also last August. Multiple sources confirmed Rajaram’s role at Facebook, though Facebook declined to.

Gokul Rajaram

Facebook has its reasons for keeping a big-name hire like Rajaram under the radar; for one, Google can’t be happy to have lost the opportunity to buy his start-up. The former Googler has been an adviser and director to multiple companies, including Canoe Ventures and Associated Content.

Elsewhere, Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt from Facebook’s first acquisition, Parakey, have had significant roles on products like Facebook Questions and the Facebook iPhone app. Ross’s title is Director of Product, though he is currently on sabbatical. Hewitt is working on undisclosed projects but “more on the engineering side,” said the spokesperson.

Facebook is not yet talking about where it will assign Sam Lessin, CEO of the just-acquired storage start-up Drop.io, and Cory Ondrejka and Bruce Rogers, founders of the just-acquired gaming start-up Walletin.

Facebook says it has about “two dozen PMs,” so the acqhired folks account for a significant but not dominant portion of that corps.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told me last month:

We have a big footprint but we want to operate like a startup and take risks, and the best way to do that is to get people who self-select towards being entrepreneurs… The only real theme is that we haven’t bought any companies yet to get the company. It’s always been because we have a lot of respect for the people involved.

This kind of track record may make Facebook an even more enticing acquirer for small start-ups. On the other hand, it’s probably disheartening for Facebook’s homegrown talent to see these opportunities handed to people who are brand-new and who, in many cases, have little experience working at the scale of hundreds of millions of users.

*Facebook has also explored larger acquisitions of companies like Twitter and Foursquare (though Kara Swisher reported those talks were less serious than portrayed elsewhere), but those deals were never consummated.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Bret Taylor photo (CC) Brian Solis.

BoomTown motored on down to the Microsoft campus in Silicon Valley on a fabulously sunny day to liveblog the latest Bing event.

The software giant is updating its search service, announcing deep integration–part of a deal announced last year–with Facebook.

The theme, according to Microsoft (MSFT) SVP Yusuf Mehdi, quoting the Beatles, was search with “a little help from your friends.”

Let’s hope it’s not: “Help, I need somebody.”

11:35 am PT: Mehdi kicks off the show, announcing the line-up, which includes Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Well, it just got 100 percent more interesting here in this nondescript auditorium.

Mehdi talks a little bit about the future of search and making it better. He talks about social being an important part of it.

While I’d have gone with Barry Manilow, he quotes the Beatles.

Mehdi is followed by Microsoft Online Services Division President Qi Lu, who throws more love bombs at Facebook.

“With the partnershop of Facebook and Bing, we will be able to unlock…how people in a social relationship can be first-class citizens in a search experience,” said Lu.

It sounds so lofty, even though it is mostly trading movie review recommendations or good places to take the kids on a rainy Sunday.

Lu thanks Zuckerberg effusively and invites him onstage.

11:54 am: No hoodie.

Zuckerberg is also “honored to be here,” giving us a little history lesson about the origins of the social networking giant and its various and sundry efforts.

I’ll be honest, the lack of donuts is making me distracted.

He’s not actually saying more than bromides about “what would social search look like.”

And looking around at who would be the right partner in the arena. Microsoft! Of course! That giant investment way back when was nice too!

“They’re really the underdog here,” said Zuckerberg in the first interesting comment, noting that overdogs–that would be Google (GOOG), which he does not mention by name–never innovate much.

His take: Underdogs are the best.

12:01 pm: Mehdi is back to show off the wares in a demo.

First, what’s there. Web search in Facebook and Facebook status updates on Bing.

Zzzzzzzz. Get to the good stuff!

First, a module that brings in a Like module from Facebook into the search, with all the other information provided by Bing.

It is, said, Mehdi, particular for a person.

“This is going to profoundly change how we search,” he said of personalized experiences.

Mehdi also shows off a way to differentiate your friends who have names of famous people, who are the ones who come up on search first.

Interesting, but people search is not the biggest problem I have.

He also says more is coming, such as friend experts surfacing in search and Like in every result on a page that it was possible. Yipes!

Also, thank the Lord, the ability to turn it off.

12:15 pm: Now Facebook exec Dan Rose comes up and starts talking about the Facebook-Microsoft bromance.

Apparently, four years is an eternity in Silicon Valley in terms of a relationship.

Actually, four weeks is long, so congrats you two crazy kids!

I’d celebrate with a donut if they were here.

“More and more” social in Bing, said Rose.

It’s a match made in digital heaven!

12:22 pm: Q&A time!

So what more? The press is so unsatisfied! Yes, we are.

Zuckerberg takes the lead. New interfaces! More!

A privacy question. “This is Instant Personalization,” said Zuckerberg, who said that Facebook has five partners in that effort.

He explains Instant Personalization, saying he wants to clear up misconceptions.

It’s private enough, you oversharers!

“Just because it is all public information about you, this is really good,” he said.

But is it by default? Of course, it is. That’s Facebook modus operandi!

Opt-out should be tattooed on employees at Facebook as a requirement.

Bing does put up a warning at the top of the page, but only five times. Then, you need to go foraging to turn it off.

Next: Does Bing search queries get sent back to Facebook? Not necessarily.

But, “everything is going to be social eventually,” said Zuckerberg, as long as it is public.

Public is apparently the new black.

More questions about new Facebook Groups and other deets, none of which is that bracing.

Apropos of nothing, I am considering asking a question about the ever-exciting Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) scandal, just to jack up the volume.

I try to ask a question about Zuckerberg’s underdog comment, but no more time.

But Zuckerberg sort of addresses it, going on about why he has picked Microsoft as the favorite.

While he does not say it, it’s because Facebook is the overdog here and, as you know, every overdog needs an underdog.

Speaking of cartoon heroes, here is the opening of that classic television show:

In the end, it was a series of service enhancements–three, to be exact, offering more-granular sharing controls, the ability to export your data and an apps dashboard.

“I promise we’re not going to talk today about anything that you’ve been reading in the news media,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said this morning. “It’s something a lot more exciting.”

“One of the big challenges for us is making it safe and easy for people to take their information to other services,” he continued. “People own their information and they should be able to take it with them wherever they want and use it however they want, in a variety of social contexts. A lot of the time people just want to have a copy of all the information they’ve put in Facebook. This is a core thing for us. People need to be able to put their information into Facebook and then take it out.”

And so Facebook is addressing that need with Download Your Information, a service that allows Facebook users to, you guessed it, easily download their information and use it to interact in a variety of social situations.

Also announced this morning, a new apps dashboard called “Applications You Use.” This offers a higher level of visibility into the apps people are using and how those apps are using their information.

Finally, the company announced a solution to what it described as social networking’s “big problem.”

“We have at Facebook what we like to call ‘The Big Problem,’” Zuckerberg said. “You have these different social circles and you want to interact with them in different ways. The reality is that for a lot of people ‘just your friends’ isn’t really private. And what a lot of people want to do is to be able to share among smaller groups within their friends….This isn’t just a problem with Facebook, but across all the applications in the ecosystem. So how do you solve this problem of subgroups?”

Evidently, there are a number of approaches. Facebook’s finally decided on one, and it’s the best of the bunch–better than any list or algorithmic solution you might conceive of. “What we think is the right solution and the one that’s going to work and be a fundamental building block of Facebook and social applications going forward,” Zuckerberg said, adding that Facebook’s solution will “blow everyone else away.”

And that solution is? An enhanced version of Facebook Groups, consisting of Shared Space, group chat and email lists.

Shared space–according to former Hot Potato CEO Justin Shaffer, who’s been quarterbacking the project since Facebook acquired his company–works pretty much as you’d expect. Create a group, add some friends and voilà: a solution to The Big Problem.

Making these advances possible is something Facebook refers to as “Social Design.” This is why Shared Space is called “space” and isn’t just a simple friend filter–even though that’s really what it appears to be. This is all, of course, part of Facebook’s “share more” philosophy, and the company clearly thinks that by allowing users to share more privately–i.e., within smaller groups of friends–they will share more. That means more user activity and data for Facebook, and the privacy concerns that go along with that.

The ability to control how much information is available to the public has long been one of Facebook’s core principles. It was this very feature, for example, that Facebook used to distinguish itself from other social networks back when it first launched.

Of course, the ensuing years proved that protecting the privacy of its users was not exactly Facebook’s strong suit–especially when it came to digging up the advertising revenues necessary to justify its fantastical $15 billion valuation. There have been privacy issues with Facebook’s news-feed service, with its controversial Beacon advertising system, and with its terms of service, which granted popular applications access to far more personal user data than is necessary.

And now there’s another. A bug in permission restrictions in Facebook Groups allows members to upload content without first receiving permission from a Group admin. I know this firsthand, because over the past few days videos, photos and blog posts have been appearing on the All Things Digital Facebook Group, and neither Walt, Kara nor I–the only three people with admin privileges to the group–put them there (see screen below). Worse, while I was able to delete the photos and blog posts, I was unable to pull the videos off the page. There was no mechanism to remove them.

Worse still, the bug that makes this possible is not specific to the All Things Digital Facebook Group alone. It affects all Facebook Groups, site-wide.

We alerted Facebook to the issue and the company quickly identified the bug. Said spokesperson Brandee Barker: “Engineering has pushed out a fix that should go site wide shortly.”

UPDATE: Facebook engineers fixed the permissions bug, and we were able to remove the rogue videos from our page.