Keep in touch via Facebook, this is critical to your future success. And we’re public now, so can you click on an ad or two when you’re there?

– Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, speaking at Harvard Business School’s “Class Day” event Wednesday

Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today are launching a nonprofit, open-sourced joint online learning venture called EdX, with the first courses to start in the fall of this year.

Basically, Harvard is jumping in as an equal partner to a previously announced project called MITx, with each school contributing faculty leaders and putting up $30 million in funding.

EdX (which was pronounced both “ed-ex” and “ee-dee-ex” at a press conference this morning) will offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free; in the future, other schools will be invited to join.

The two Boston-area schools are essentially leapfrogging Stanford University, where a set of online classes last year gave rise to the creation of two for-profit companies led by the Stanford professors who taught the classes — Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity and Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng’s Coursera. Stanford is still figuring out its own approach to online learning.

EdX will bring MIT and Harvard courses to students around the world, with no admissions requirements, free classes, and “a modest fee” for credentials earned by students, according to plans posted today.

The open source platform will include “self-paced learning, online discussion groups, wiki-based collaborative learning, assessment of learning as a student progresses through a course, and online laboratories.”

The first courses have not been chosen yet, and many other details have yet to be figured out.

“Online education is not an enemy of residential education, but rather a profoundly liberating and expanding ally,” said MIT President Susan Hockfield at a press conference this morning.

EdX is also an opportunity to push forward education research, said the project’s leaders.

EdX President Anant Agarwal

EdX is inspired in part by Sal Khan’s Khan Academy, and will include videos made in his style, said Anant Agarwal, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Agarwal will be the first president of EdX.

Of other online learning initiatives, including those that are for profit, Agarwal said, “Of course, all of us are looking at each other. At the end of the day, I think the more online educators there are, I think the better off the whole world is.”

In a survey of technology experts and stakeholders, conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center, 65 percent of people said they believe that mobile payment technology will be widespread by 2020.

Meanwhile, it found a dissenting view, with 33 percent of those same stakeholders believing it will take longer because people will resist technology that wants to learn everything about their personal purchasing habits.

Relatively few people believed that cash or credit cards will disappear entirely.

It’s unclear whether the 2020 date is optimistic or seems too far out given that so many companies are investing aggressively today. PayPal and Google are the two most notable technology companies going after the opportunity, but so are the incumbents, including Visa, MasterCard and American Express. Additionally, the U.S. wireless carriers are mapping out their own plans through a joint venture called Isis.

As part of the report, Pew published remarks from a few respondents:

Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian said: “The 2020 date might be a bit optimistic, but I’m sure that this will happen. What is in your wallet now? Identification, payment, and personal items. All this will easily fit in your mobile device and will inevitably do so.”

Susan Crawford, professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, put it more practically: “There is nothing more imaginary than a monetary system. … Of course we’ll move to even more abstract representations of value. Other countries are already content to use their phones; we’ll catch up eventually.”

The concept represents a huge shift in the way women shop for clothes. Currently, women’s sizes are based on standards created in the 1940s, said Christina Wallace, Quincy Apparel’s co-founder and CEO. But Wallace said a lot has changed. Women are taller and there are a larger variety of shapes.

Most importantly, “we are definitely bustier,” she said.

The idea for creating a new line of clothing, based on bra size and sold over the Internet, came after Wallace and her co-founder Alex Nelson graduated and were shopping for business suits.

“We were both misfits, but the more we talked to friends, we found that everyone considered themselves to be a misfit,” she said. “If no one can wear these clothes, our bodies aren’t the problem.”

Traditionally, men buy suits based on their inseam and waist size and have jackets tailored to fit their shoulders and arm length. In contrast, women buy suits off the rack in dress sizes, and are rarely offered tailoring as part of the sale.

The result is poorly fitting clothes. Jackets and blouses ride up, don’t provide enough coverage, gape at the chest, or fall flat because of extra room.

“Men are astounded that this is how women’s clothes are sized,” Wallace said. “I don’t know a single man who hasn’t had a suit tailored to fit him.”

Last week, the site started selling five different jacket varieties, ranging from a two-button sandstone blazer to a more hip burnt orange one-button wool jacket. For now, inventory is limited while the company gets off the ground. It has plans to expand soon to blouses, dresses, pants and skirts.

The clothes are sewn in New York City and are sold in a variety of sizes, such as 38-C/D Tall or 32-A Short. If women aren’t particularly sure of their bra size, there’s a short questionnaire that helps confirm which size you should order.

Wallace said they have raised an undisclosed amount of capital in a seed round, but generally had a hard time getting the attention of venture capitalists.

“I think it has been interesting to raise for this,” Wallace said. “We are going to middle-aged investors who don’t get the market. They go ask their wives, who haven’t been in our market for awhile, and so there’s been some questioning as to whether this is a problem or a need. We need to launch and show the need.”

Just yesterday, Justin Kan, the co-founder of Justin.tv, launched Exec, an iPhone app that helps people complete tasks on demand.

Now there’s another entrant in the space: Done, which employs local “Doers” and experts in certain fields to help people get things done — with a charitable twist.

The site launches in New York today, and features around 100 New Yorkers who specialize in certain areas or tasks. Done verifies its Doers through in-person interviews as well as background checks, aided by HireRight. Since Doers have to sign into Done through Facebook, they’re also Facebook-checked, and have to be endorsed by at least two friends or contacts. There’s also a section on the site for hirers to review the Doers.

For now, it’s a Web-only service, and only in New York at the start. But mobile applications — and more cities — are on Done’s road map, co-founder and CEO Kevin Nazemi says.

“We think the neighbor-to-neighbor trend is where e-commerce was in 1995: It’s just getting started,” Nazemi says. “There are players out there who have already started, but it’s not always the company who announces first or gets the resources first that ends up winning.”

Nazemi says Done is different from other services because it focuses on personalization: The Doer’s identities are front and center on the site, with big, slick photos and detailed profiles, so users feel like they’re hiring a real person and not just a temporary worker. (Nazemi does concede that as the service grows, Done likely won’t be able to conduct in-person interviews with every Doer. TaskRabbit, for example, uses videoconferencing as part of its multistep process to vet its thousands of Rabbits). By offering “experts” in certain areas, Done hopes to nab repeat customers in addition to people just looking to get a task completed.

Done also says it takes a 10 percent cut of every transaction made through the site, paid by the Doer; TaskRabbit has said that its average service fee is 15 percent.

And then there’s charitable-giving element to Done, which Nazemi stresses was important to him and his co-founders when they were creating the service. Every time a transaction occurs through Done, the company completes one of three tasks through UNICEF: Delivering clean water, buying school supplies or providing a vaccine for polio. Right now, the company is only working with UNICEF, but says it plans to add more charities to its list.

Done was launched by former MIT roommates Nazemi, Paul Covell and Ken Nesmith. The start-up’s initial seed investment of $1 million comes from Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital, and other individual investors, including Harvard Business School professors Bill Sahlman and Joseph Bower.

I realize that this will be a bummer for some of you who thought you could enter an athletics-free zone, now that the Super Bowl is over.

But in the last week, Jeremy Lin has become a national sensation, and one who resonates with a certain slice of tech-savvy Twitter and Facebook users. Which means you’re going to see a lot of him, at least in the very near future.

Who is Jeremy Lin? Easy enough to Google him, or to read any number of profiles, like this nice piece from the New York Times. But if you’re in a real hurry, and/or lazy –

Guys, I’m tired. Can someone Cliffs Note this “Jeremy Lin” thing for me?

— ericspiegelman (@ericspiegelman) February 11, 2012

We can help you out here:

• Jeremy Lin’s parents emigrated from Taiwan to the Bay Area in the 1970s.
• Jeremy Lin played basketball at Palo Alto High School.
• Jeremy Lin played basketball at Harvard, where he earned an economics degree.
• After Harvard, Jeremy Lin played briefly for the Golden State Warriors, who let him go, and the Houston Rockets, who let him go.
• Last December, the New York Knicks hired him as a backup player, and he only played briefly for the team until last week.
• Last week, Jeremy Lin started playing a lot for the Knicks, because they had run out of bodies in his position. Since then, he’s played at a very high level. And the Knicks, who have been very bad for a long time, have won all of their games.
• The Knicks’ last game was last night, where they beat the Los Angeles Lakers and Kobe Bryant in a game that lots of people watched.
• Jeremy Lin’s instant celebrity comes from the conflation of several currents: He is a very rare Ivy League graduate playing and succeeding in the NBA. And he is an even rarer Asian-American playing in the NBA — just the fourth in the league’s history. And he plays in New York, a city that loves basketball and winners, and which still has an outsized influence on media. It’s an underdog story that is almost literally unbelievable. And one that touches on race and culture in a way that’s exciting without making (most) people uncomfortable.*
• If none of this appeals to you, you must really, really hate sports. Weird. But simple probability is in your favor, since Lin can’t keep this streak going indefinitely. And at some point, the hysteria will dissipate, and you won’t have to feign interest in three-point shots when you talk to prominent angel investors, entrepreneurs, etc.
• Then again, we would have said that six days ago, too.

Too many words? Okay. Some moving pictures:

*Now that Jeremy Lin is a meme, some of the race/class stuff will unfortunately become much less pleasant.

The San Francisco social games company is looking to raise as much as $1.15 billion, which would make it the largest IPO from a U.S. Internet company since Google raised $1.7 billion in 2004.

Shares will likely be sold on Thursday, with the company trading under the ticker ZNGA for the first time on Friday. In the meantime, the company is trying to jockey for the best price and the most shares sold.

At a luncheon yesterday with potential investors, CEO Mark Pincus made one of his boldest predictions yet when it comes to how well its games will monetize.

Currently, Zynga has about 227 million monthly active users who play games for free on Facebook, such as FarmVille, CityVille, Zynga Poker and Mafia Wars. But only a small fraction — around 3 percent — pay for additional features, such as decorative items for a farm or new clothes for an avatar.

“We could see that doubling,” said Pincus, according to Reuters.

Doubling? That’s sure to whet investors’ appetites.

But it’s hard to know how the company will accomplish that.

To be sure, Zynga is about to enter one of its biggest growth periods yet and anticipates launching several new games over the next few months.

On one level, more games will likely translate to more players. But will it translate to more players willing to pay?

That seems like a leap of faith.

However, based on documents filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, we have gleaned that some of Zynga’s growth prospects are guaranteed thanks to the company’s close – albeit complicated – relationship with Facebook.

As one of the conditions of its partnerships, Facebook is obligated to help Zynga meet certain growth targets. In return, Zynga has committed to offering Facebook a number of exclusive game titles.

The specific details of the relationship were redacted in the document, so it’s not clear how aggressive those growth targets are over the five-year life of the contract.

Zynga also has close ties with Google, which has recently launched its own games network. Zynga has already launched several titles there, including CityVille. Following the offering, Google will own 3.8 percent of the company.

Also during yesterday’s lunch, Zynga’s executives were grilled about player retention and churn rates and its growth prospects for mobile.

Among several responses, Pincus joked about how Alec Baldwin was recently kicked off a flight after getting caught playing Words With Friends while still at the gate.

It seemed investors were not as interested in hearing about recent negative reports that Pincus’s hard-charging personality has made it an unfavorable working environment or that some employees were asked to give up their stock options.

Plus, it’s a crowd that Pincus should be comfortable speaking in front of. This will be the second company the Wharton and Harvard Business School grad has taken public.

The company will continue to have meetings today and into next week. So far, reports indicate that the conversations are going well.

Zynga has apparently already received enough orders to cover all the shares being sold in its initial public offering, reports BusinessWeek, which talked to two people with knowledge of the situation. Zynga plans to sell 100 million shares for $8.50 to $10 apiece, which would value the company at as much as $7 billion.

The brief was actually filed back in June, and I found a better, watermark-free copy of it here on the Web site of the Winklevoss lawyers. Last night I took the time to read it in full, and it was surprisingly not boring.

Perhaps the most revelatory thing in the Facebook filing is that Facebook’s lawyers seem to be having fun with the case. Their writing is laden with imagery and over-the-top exasperation with the Winklevii’s allegedly poorly formed legal arguments. Here’s the dramatic intro to the brief:

This appeal arises from the settlement of rancorous litigation on two coasts. On one side were Appellees Facebook, Inc. and its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. On the other side were the Appellants, who founded a failing competitor of Facebook’s called ConnectU. The CU Founders claimed that they had the idea for Facebook first, and Facebook stole their idea. Facebook denied those claims and, for its part, accused ConnectU and its Founders of unlawfully infiltrating its systems, stealing millions of email addresses, and then spamming them. During a global mediation, the parties signed a “Term Sheet and Settlement Agreement.” In the interest of achieving litigation peace, Facebook agreed to purchase ConnectU for [redacted] dollars and [redacted] shares of Facebook stock, one of the hottest startups in the world. Surrounded by a bevy of lawyers, the CU Founders signed the deal. Then they suffered a bout of settlers’ remorse. They ask this Court to relieve them of the deal they struck to plunge back into scorched-earth litigation.

Besides the writing, the other thing that’s interesting is the information about the terms of the relationship between Facebook and ConnectU. While the story has been simplified into a Hollywood-style betrayal as portrayed in “The Social Network,” the outcome of Zuckerberg and the Winklevii’s legal mediation is much less widely reported.

As part of its settlement with the Winklevoss twins, Facebook agreed to acquire their social network ConnectU (which they eventually did find someone to build), and has been “operating” it since Dec. 2008, the filing says (the site itself is offline).

Facebook contends that this earlier agreement to buy ConnectU was final, while the Winklevii are calling it a draft (their co-founder Divya Narendra has publicly said he’s moved past the Zuckerberg vendetta, though he’s mentioned in the filings as well).

The settlement came after closed-door professional mediation in February 2008. Facebook says it’s outraged that the Winklevii and their lawyers are bringing conversations from mediation back into the appeal, because all involved were sworn to confidentiality.

(You can also read the ConnectU appeal brief for the case to which Facebook was responding. However the bits from the mediation that were supposed to be confidential have been blacked out.)

But after the settlement, ConnectU came back to the table asking for its share to be revalued. It had originally negotiated using a publicly reported valuation from when Microsoft invested in Facebook, rather than an internal valuation from around the same time that would have priced the shares much lower ($8.88 versus $35.90). A revaluation of the shares to a smaller amount would give the twins a larger stake in the company.

And also, the Winklevii wanted the transaction to be labeled a merger instead of an acquisition so they could avoid paying some taxes on it.

Facebook replied in the June brief, again in remarkably florid fashion:

“First, the CU Founders try to leave this Court with the impression that the only valuation figure they knew was the $15 billion figure from the Microsoft press release, and that they, therefore, had reason to enshrine it as gospel. They also portray the one 409A valuation on which they rely here as some seismic event in the life of the company, as if an unexpected bolt of lightning from on high emblazoned $8.88 onto a couple of tablets. Both the impressions are false.”

Facebook, by the way, to add insult to injury, says the internal valuation of its shares at the time of the Microsoft investment was actually even lower than the Winklevoss lawyers are arguing: Six days before the Microsoft transaction, Facebook had filed a document valuing employee stock options at just $6.61.

The attorney who signed the Facebook brief is Monte Cooper of Orrick, an intellectual property specialist. I hope he also writes novels in his spare time.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

This Sunday, the CBS television news magazine “60 Minutes” returns to Facebook after several years to check in on co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

In the first interview by correspondent Lesley Stahl in early 2008, Zuckerberg’s social networking empire was much smaller, beset by a series of management snafus and mired in yet another privacy controversy.

Plus, he was more than a lot more awkward. His “was-that-a-question?” response to an obvious question by Stahl was a near classic in geek communications.

Fast-forward to today: Zuckerberg rules an incredibly powerful tech company worth gazillions more (good), has developed into a very polished leader (good) and even had a big Hollywood movie called “The Social Network” made about him (not so good).

Presumably, Stahl will cover all that in her new chat with him, which includes a visit to Facebook’s new Palo Alto, Calif. HQ.

Stahl also interviewed me again and pistol-whipped me–okay, she just asked–until I took back my snarkiest remark from the first one, in which I called Zuckerberg a “toddler CEO.”

My new take, now sporting smart-lady glasses and much grayer hair: The toddler has turned out to be a prodigy!

In other words, the worm has officially turned.

Stahl also wanted to know about the rivalry with Google, the fallout of the movie, my epic de-hoodie-ing of Zuckerberg at D8 conference and what-up with the Winklevii (whom, I believe, I called “hambones.”)

Here is a small taste of the new piece, which airs at 7 pm this Sunday, followed by the entire one from 2008 and the blog post I did about it:

For those who missed it, here is the entire video of the piece CBS’ “60 Minutes” aired on Facebook last night, helmed by veteran correspondent Lesley Stahl.

It is not exactly the big wet kiss I was expecting the hot social networking company would get, but it was also definitely not an ouch-that-hurts piece that could have been done.

For those who don’t know the tale, it hits all the high (and low) points of the Facebook saga, with a button-pushing efficiency that television does so well. Thus, a synopsis:

Web Wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg, who seems genetically unable to smile (unlike, say, his deeply charming sister). Harvard. Ratty hoodies and flip-flops. Mark makes a Facebook profile for Lesley (how much do we love that she blocked her boss Les Moonves?).

Next stop: Silicon Valley! Dropping out and venture funding. Toddler CEO (that one was coined by BoomTown). Crazy HQ with kooky-looking employees, one of whom you know was forced to ride a unicycle through the office by Lesley.

Big growth. Is Mark Google’s Larry and Sergey rolled into one? Inexplicably, ZERO mention of its bigger rival, MySpace, even once. Worth $15 billion?–an insane number Lesley does not question nearly enough.

Oops, Privacy! Oops, Beacon! BoomTown tsks-tsks that stalkerish advertising idiocy and is asked about Mark’s qualifications as CEO (although no one cares what BoomTown thinks). Mark retorts: Hey, we need to make money. Lesley, so give the Wunderkind a break!

What’s different is that rather than playing in their own siloed version of the game, friends can place businesses in each other’s cities, and benefit from the success of these franchises. CityVille also uses 3-D rendered buildings and characters and will be released in five languages, both things Zynga has never done before.

But for all those firsts, the game will only be released on Facebook. Zynga is of course working to diversify its platforms, adding iPhone, iPad, Android and Yahoo. But as a matter of priorities, said CityVille general manager Sean Kelly, “We feel like Facebook is the best partner to prove out.”

Kelly, who previously was GM of Zynga’s FishVille, declined to say how long Zynga had been developing CityVille, or how many people were on his team. However, he said this was the “first job ever” for half of his developers, and that his team also included game industry veterans from places like Blizzard, as well as longer-term employees of Zynga. Plus, one CityVille product manager came from Harvard Business School, so he helped the team create its in-game franchising arrangements. And an architect advised on how to properly build structures within the game.

This is only Zynga’s third game launch this year, after Treasure Isle and FrontierVille. The actual release of CityVille will be sometime over the next few days Update: weeks, based on the alignment of the stars and other factors.

You may know me from my writings at GigaOM, where I covered topics like the social Web and online video for the last four years. If this is your first time reading me, I hope you’ll find my writing, reporting and analysis worth sticking around for.

My beat at All Things Digital is All Things Social, and you’ll be able to find my stories under the heading NetworkEffect, named after the idea that a community of users makes a service valuable for everyone who joins.

On the social Web, network effects help us improve the lives of our friends, family and neighbors, when we sign up for the same Web services and share our lives and experiences; they also factor in the power of critical mass to create new businesses from scratch. In the six years I’ve been a tech reporter, companies I’ve watched being born–such as Facebook, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube–have come to be major parts of people’s lives around the world. And I think that’s pretty awesome.

Of course, not everyone agrees. Example du jour: In this month’s New York Review of Books, the author Zadie Smith (whose novels I like very much) applied her considerable forces of perception to Facebook and the implications of its creation myth. Smith’s credentials to analyze Facebook are: She was a fellow at Harvard University when it was founded, she spent only two months trying the service before leaving it, she’s a full nine years older than Mark Zuckerberg (ancient!), and she calls herself a “private person.”

In her piece, Smith charged that Facebook encourages highly superficial, low-effort communication that threatens to replace actual relationships and experiences. She cited Jaron Lanier to assert that computers cannot represent actual human relationships, and, further, that the limitations of a tool can shape what its users think is possible.

So, basically, Facebook is devaluing the way we relate to each other.

Smith thinks her problems with Facebook come back to the site being created by Zuckerberg as an immature college sophomore who desperately wanted to be liked. “If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out,” she wrote. “[T]o Zuckerberg sharing your choices with everybody (and doing what they do) is being somebody.”

If we really wanted to write to these faraway people, or see them, we would. What we actually want to do is the bare minimum, just like any nineteen-year-old college boy who’d rather be doing something else, or nothing.

Smith noted in the piece that she doesn’t actively use Facebook herself, but she looked up some of Zuckerberg’s recent public comments and keenly observes that the Facebook CEO “uses the word ‘connect’ as believers use the word ‘Jesus,’ as if it were sacred in and of itself.”

Personally, I see my relationships extended and improved on Facebook, whether it’s knowing what my extended family is up to on a daily basis, or the great conversations I’ve had in the past few days about Death Valley, after I posted an album of pictures from my between-jobs road trip to the desert last week.

Still, I don’t often find visiting Facebook to be deeply satisfying either. But, whereas Smith sees reasons to run away screaming, I see an opportunity to better address some of the parts she finds lacking.

The real story here?

It’s about the capability of the social Web to improve so it better serves and extends our real-world relationships. It’s about the fact that these sites and apps are created by people whose versions of the world are expressed in them. It’s about the potential to communicate with people you don’t know, to cultivate and reward passionate fans and to learn the dark art of self-promotion. It’s about the wide-open opportunity to improve on and compete with Facebook, which is still really far away from delivering on its potential to improve the lives of the half-billion people who already use it regularly and the many more who don’t. Simply put, there’s a lot more to be done.

And that’s what I want to write about.

(P.S. As detailed in my ethics statement, which I will keep updated, my husband is a part-time employee at Facebook. His work is not a part of my reporting, and I obviously find the company fascinating and will not shy away from writing about it–both the good parts and the bad ones. )

The difference here? Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg really, really wanted to work with Drop.io founder Sam Lessin. That’s why Facebook not only gave Lessin’s investors a return on their money, but paid for the deal with Facebook stock instead of cash.

People familiar with the transaction tell me that Drop.io’s investors–primarily DFJ Gotham and RRE Ventures–ended up with something close to double the $10 million they put into the company over the past two years, and that they were paid out in common stock.

At one point in Facebook’s history, that wouldn’t have been remarkable. But as Facebook has shot up in usage, employee size and valuation, its managers have become loath to hand out shares in advance of an IPO.

For instance, after the company bought Hot Potato and founder Justin Shaffer this summer, there was some sotto voce grumbling from investors that only Shaffer received Facebook equity, while his backers got cash.

With the exception of the payment, the Drop.io deal looks very similar. Like Shaffer, Lessin will move from Brooklyn to Palo Alto to work at Facebook headquarters. And like Hot Potato, Drop.io will be shut down.

So what makes Lessin worth precious Facebook shares?

We know that Lessin and Zuckerberg have been tight since they met at Harvard ( Caroline McCarthy has more on that here). Perhaps as important: I’m told that prior to the deal Drop.io had begun work on a new product that was meant to supplant its consumer-facing storage service. (UPDATE: Samuel Clay, via Twitter, suggests that Drop.io was working on a “a wrapper for [content delivery networks]. Auction-style bidding for lowest cost delivery of content.”. That synchs up with what I’ve heard. But if true, not sure it explains Zuckerberg’s interest.)

Love to know more, but Facebook and Lessin are staying mum for now.

Those efforts range from attempting to massage the script, according to one of the film’s producers, to promoting an alternative corporate history.

The movie, “The Social Network,” depicts Mr. Zuckerberg as a socially awkward egomaniac who may have stolen the idea for his company from fellow students while he was an undergraduate at Harvard University.

The film—which premieres Friday night and will be widely released Oct. 1 by Sony Corp.’s (SNE) Sony Pictures—takes as its narrative framework two lawsuits over the company’s origins. Facebook later settled the cases.

On Friday, Mr. Zuckerberg will announce on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” that he is donating $100 million to the public schools in Newark, N.J.— his first major act of philanthropy.

According to a person familiar with the matter, Facebook didn’t time Mr. Zuckerberg’s gift for the film’s premiere.
Mr. Zuckerberg, through a company spokesman, declined to be interviewed for this article.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The New Yorker finally came out with its profile of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today, titled “The Face of Facebook.”

And while the magazine piece by Jose Antonio Vargas reads well, there is not much new in it for those who have followed the career of the innovative young wunderkind of social networking.

Exeter computer prodigy, Harvard computer prodigy, Silicon Valley computer prodigy. Throw in the Winklevii’s ceaseless quest to say they could have been somebody (they couldn’t have been), mix in Sean Parker and set to bake to billions.

Vargas did score a few interviews with Zuckerberg, including a visit to his current home and a short glimpse of him interacting with his longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan.

But, like Zuckerberg himself, it’s kind of all gray T-shirt and hoodie and working at Facebook.

The best part is Hollywood writer Aaron Sorkin, who penned the upcoming Zuckerberg-slasher, “The Social Network,” finding out his subject loves his television classic “The West Wing.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” he responded to Vargas.

Oh, suck it up, Aaron, as Mark surely will have to when the movie comes out October 1.

Until then and as usual: Gray T-shirt, hood and, of course, Facebook.

A nice little bit of back-to-school marketing for Apple (AAPL), which likely has an eye trained on education sales as the new school year begins.

Digits spoke with Jonathan Zittrain, a law and computer science professor at Harvard and one of the founders of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, about technology’s role in facilitating the release of information. Highlights of his responses are below.

How does technology help the distribution of this type of information?
I think technology in general facilitates the flow of information from one place to the other. It’s pretty amazing that you have thousands of classified documents released at once, and the government seems implicitly aware that they can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

The technology structure being used here is not very advanced; it’s very Web 1.0. The fact that it can be mirrored and remirrored makes a difference. But to actually get something out without being traced is still difficult.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

After a tough summer–including creepy trailers for a Hollywood movie, “The Social Network,” in which he seems to be portrayed as the awkward villain and also his sometimes difficult session at the eighth D: All Thing Digital conference with me and Walt Mossberg–Mark Zuckerberg catches a break in an easy-peasy multi-part television interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer.

It aired earlier in the week, and a smilier-than-usual Facebook co-founder and CEO does a good job lobbing back Sawyer’s queries, which touch on the usual controversies (privacy, I-know-what-you-did-at-Harvard), the usual gee-whiz Silicon Valley oohing and, of course, the obsession with Zuckerberg’s age (upon which I declare an official BoomTown moratorium, since he is no longer that young).

If you don’t know a lot about the social networking powerhouse, you’ll find it useful; if you do, watch it anyway.

Enjoy:

Hello Facebook!

Meet Mark!

Free Food! Also Drycleaning!

Uh-oh, Privacy!

Double Uh-Oh, That #@&*% Movie!

Viewer Questions!

A Dislike Button!

As CEO, you must constantly evaluate all of the members of your team. However, evaluating people against the future needs of the company based on a theoretical view of how they will perform is counterproductive for the following reasons:

So, if you don’t prejudge people’s ability to scale, how do you make the judgment? You should evaluate your team at least once a quarter on all dimensions. Two keys can help you avoid the scale anticipation trap:

• Don’t separate scale from the rest of the evaluation–The relevant question isn’t whether an executive can scale; it’s whether the executive can do the job at the current scale. You should evaluate holistically and this will prevent you from separating scale, which often leads to a prediction of future performance.
• Make the judgment on a relative rather than an absolute scale–Asking yourself whether or not an executive is great can be extremely difficult to answer. A better question is: For this company at this exact point in time, does there exist an executive I can hire who will be better? If my biggest competitor hires that person, how will that impact our ability to win?

In summary, predicting whether or not an executive can scale corrupts your ability to manage, is unfair, and doesn’t work.

Calling “really slows you down,” says the 22-year-old physics and math major from Honolulu.

The way Mr. Robb and his friends use their phones offers a glimpse of where consumer technology is heading. Their phones are used non-stop for their social lives and their group project to design a mobile guidebook to Cambridge. The friends also show how quickly change is happening: When Mr. Robb’s friend Winston Yan, a 21-year-old physics major from Alexandria, Va., arrived as a freshman in 2006, he had a phone that couldn’t send or receive email.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Debate over that controversial idea took center stage at the Federal Communications Commission Thursday, where agency officials are considering a Harvard study that suggested the approach would help improve U.S. broadband availability and affordability.

“U.S. performance [in Internet speeds and availability] is not at the kind of level that we can say no matter what others are doing, we’re doing better. We’re not doing better,” said Yochai Benkler, co-director of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, at an FCC workshop.

The workshop was the latest in an exhaustive series held by FCC officials as part of their efforts to write a National Broadband Plan for the U.S. The plan would offer a blueprint for what the government could do to improve the availability of high-speed Internet service.

The agency has estimated it could cost anywhere from $20 billion to $350 billion to ensure every American has access to high-speed Internet service.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

BoomTown tried to get Chris Kelly (pictured here) to give up more during an onstage interview I did with the Facebook chief privacy officer last night at the third “Tech Policy Summit” and was only moderately successful in the endeavor.

He talked about the recent Terms of Service debacle as a snafu that got sensationalized by the media, the Beacon advertising controversy as a snafu that got sensationalized by the media and the Free-the-Scoble-5,000 data-sharing debate as a snafu that got sensationalized by the media.

But Kelly also managed to say that the media were sensational for keeping Facebook–the dominant social-networking site in the whole wide world–honest as it grows into a behemoth grasping a scary amount of personal information on its 200 million users in its claws.

Oh, he is a smoothie all right, as a lawyer and now as a wannabe politician.

Kelly–who is still working at the start-up, where his job it is to make sure consumer data, privacy, the children and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s reputation are all safe and sound–is also running for the job of California’s attorney general.

(Here is his Facebook page about the effort.)

Born in Silicon Valley, with a troika of diplomas from fancy schools (undergraduate from Georgetown in 1991, a master’s from Yale in 1992 and a law degree from Harvard in 1997), Kelly worked as a lawyer and also as a policy adviser for President Bill Clinton’s White House Domestic Policy Council and Department of Education before coming to Facebook four years ago.

For a closer look-see at the candidate for the Golden State’s top cop position, here’s a video interview I did with him after the onstage chat in San Mateo, Calif.:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090512/facebooks-privacy-chief-and-california-attorney-general-candidate-chris-kelly-speaks/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090204/facebook-at-five-remembering-the-early-years-and-measuring-up-against-google/ http://allthingsd.com/20090204/facebook-at-five-remembering-the-early-years-and-measuring-up-against-google/#comments Wed, 04 Feb 2009 11:00:18 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=3841 Happy Birthday, Facebook! You’re 5 years old today, and that’s pretty cool. But the party you’re throwing yourself? Not much fun.

How about this instead: Some brief reminiscing, via this June 2004 Harvard Crimson article, written “nearly a semester after” 20-year-old Mark Zuckerberg had launched thefacebook.com. At the time, it had 160,000 users.

It’s a great story (thanks to the excellent Nieman Journalism Lab for pointing this out via its Twitter feed), but let’s just zoom right ahead to the end:

Zuckerberg participated in a live television interview for CNBC, and says he has been wined and dined in Harvard Square by representatives from major software companies.

Still, he is maintaining the same approach: don’t sell.

“That’s just like not something we’re really interested in,” he says, referring to selling out thefacebook.com. “I mean, yeah, we can make a bunch of money—that’s not the goal…I mean, like, anyone from Harvard can get a job and make a bunch of money. Not everyone at Harvard can have a social network. I value that more as a resource more than like any money.”…

“My goal is to not have a job,” he says matter-of-factly. “Making cool things is just something I love doing, and not having someone tell me what to do or a timeframe in which to do it is the luxury I am looking for in my life.”…”I assume eventually I’ll make something that is profitable,” he allows.

The site is currently running some advertisements, but Zuckerberg says they are only being used to offset server costs. Nonetheless, the facebook’s business manager has posted notices soliciting ads on multiple websites, and a thefacebook.com rate card shows that the site is interested in attracting national advertisers….

“There are a couple ads on the facebook because [the site] costs money and servers don’t grow on trees,” Zuckerberg says.

But will the facebook ever be auctioned off to the highest bidder?

“Maybe when I’m bored with it, then we’ll work something out,” he says. “But I don’t see that happening anytime in the near future.”

Cool foreshadowing, huh? (Harvard kids! So smart!) But let’s put Facebook’s success in context–by comparing it to Silicon Valley’s most successful start-up of the last couple of decades. Here’s how Facebook today stacks up against the Google of 2003, when that company was 5 years old.

I’ve pulled the Facebook stats from various sources, so please consider them estimates. The Google (GOOG) stats are much more solid: I’ve pulled most of them from the company’s 2004 IPO prospectus.

Facebook:
Workforce: 700+
Revenue: $260 – $300 million
Net income: None (EBITDA of perhaps $50 million)
Valuation: Something in the $4 billion range, based on reports of share sales
Motto: “Facebook is about helping people to share information and share themselves.”

Google:
Workforce: 1,907 (as of March 2004)
Revenue: $962 million
Net income: $106 million
Valuation: Something in the $20 billion range, based on press reports
Motto: “Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served–as shareholders and in all other ways–by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.”

So take a bow, Mark Zuckerberg. You’ve built something really cool. But if you want to keep up with Larry and Sergey, you’d better get back to work.

[Image Credit: deneyterrio]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090204/facebook-at-five-remembering-the-early-years-and-measuring-up-against-google/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081103/google-just-who-do-these-uppity-harvard-folk-think-they-are/ http://allthingsd.com/20081103/google-just-who-do-these-uppity-harvard-folk-think-they-are/#comments Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:37:07 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=7679 Harvard University, which eagerly signed onto Google’s controversial book scanning project in 2005, isn’t so keen on the project now that the company’s agreed to settle the lawsuits questioning its legality. Troubled by uncertainties in the settlement, Harvard will not participate in Google’s in-copyright book scanning effort–even if Google’s recent $125 million settlement with the Authors Guild and an alliance of five major publishers is approved.

“As we understand it, the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher education community and by patrons of public libraries,” University Library Director Robert C. Darnton said in a message to library staff. “The settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable, especially since the subscription services will have no real competitors [and] the scope of access to the digitized books is in various ways both limited and uncertain.”

Which is not to say that Harvard doesn’t believe that universal access to the world’s books is mission-critical for universities. It clearly does, and will continue to work with the company to digitize books that have fallen out of copyright. But until the quality of the book scans improves (see sample below) and Google (GOOG) sets a clear pricing scheme, the university can support, Harvard will be providing the company only with out-of-copyright works pulled from its Depository collection.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081103/google-just-who-do-these-uppity-harvard-folk-think-they-are/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20081103/google-just-who-do-these-uppity-harvard-folk-think-they-are-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20081103/google-just-who-do-these-uppity-harvard-folk-think-they-are-2/#comments Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:37:07 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=7679 Harvard University, which eagerly signed onto Google’s controversial book scanning project in 2005, isn’t so keen on the project now that the company’s agreed to settle the lawsuits questioning its legality. Troubled by uncertainties in the settlement, Harvard will not participate in Google’s in-copyright book scanning effort–even if Google’s recent $125 million settlement with the Authors Guild and an alliance of five major publishers is approved.

“As we understand it, the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher education community and by patrons of public libraries,” University Library Director Robert C. Darnton said in a message to library staff. “The settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable, especially since the subscription services will have no real competitors [and] the scope of access to the digitized books is in various ways both limited and uncertain.”

Which is not to say that Harvard doesn’t believe that universal access to the world’s books is mission-critical for universities. It clearly does, and will continue to work with the company to digitize books that have fallen out of copyright. But until the quality of the book scans improves (see sample below) and Google (GOOG) sets a clear pricing scheme, the university can support, Harvard will be providing the company only with out-of-copyright works pulled from its Depository collection.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081103/google-just-who-do-these-uppity-harvard-folk-think-they-are-2/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081006/time-to-poach-a-few-more-googlers-eh-mark/ http://allthingsd.com/20081006/time-to-poach-a-few-more-googlers-eh-mark/#comments Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:11:13 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=6296

Facebook really is That company. Which company? That one. That company that shows up once in a very long while–the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago. That company where large numbers of stunningly-brilliant people congregate and feed off each other’s genius. That company that’s doing with 60 engineers what teams of 600 can’t pull off. That company that’s on the cusp of Changing The World, that’s still small enough where each employee has a huge impact on the organization, where you think about working now and again, and where you know you’ll kick yourself in three years if you don’t jump on the bandwagon now, even after someone had told you that it was rolling toward the promised land. That company where everyone seems to be having the time of their life. … I’m serious. I have drunk from the Kool-Aid, and it is delicious.”

– Facebook manager Justin Rosenstein, June 15, 2007

Facebook manager Justin Rosenstein once described the social network as “the Google (GOOG) of yesterday, the Microsoft (MSFT) of long ago.” Today, Rosenstein perhaps views it as the Facebook of So Totally Last Week because he’s leaving the company, along with departing Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Together the two hope to develop some sort of new extensible enterprise productivity suite, something that will be “to your work life what Facebook.com is to your social life,” according to a post on Rosenstein’s Facebook page.

“We see this new venture as very complementary to Facebook,” Rosenstein explained. “We hope our products will become to your work life what Facebook.com is to your social life. Our software will use Facebook Connect as the default option for identity and authentication. Our user interface will adopt many of Facebook’s conventions, creating a seamless and familiar experience for current Facebook users. And if our new development tools turn out to be useful, we hope the Facebook engineering team will come to adopt them.”

The departures are a blow to Facebook, which has been suffering something of a brain drain recently, and more specifically, to CEO Mark Zuckerberg who founded the company with Moskovitz while the two were undergraduates at Harvard.

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