Apparently, there is no time lag anymore when it comes to telling the stories of epic fail on the Internet.

I got an email this afternoon from an anonymous Myspace employee who wrote about an interesting group-writing effort on Google Docs called “Real Myspace Stories.”

Said the page, which was created after the fire sale of the News Corp.-owned social networking company for $35 million to Specific Media today, which also included major layoffs:

The rise and fall of Myspace will be one of the more interesting tech stories for years to come. Nobody knows more about how and why things begin going wrong than the people who worked there everyday. We need to tell our story to help make sure something like this doesn’t happen again. This is not about News Corp executives, analysts, or other armchair quarterbacks — but real stories from the employees of Myspace. The good, the bad, the ugly, let’s tell it all. Fill out the short form below if you want to help make this happen and tell your stories.

Our goal is to quickly publish a crowdsourced book from Myspace employees about Myspace. Any profits will be donated to nonprofits, entrepreneur education, and/or a new VC fund that supports Myspace alumni’s new ventures.

Nice.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site; also, I took the odd photo above at a rest stop in California.)

That was fast.

Which is probably apt, given the subject matter of a book coming out soon made up of real-time Twitter from Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

“Tweets from Tahrir,” which is being published by Or Books on April 21, says it is chronicling “an entirely new way of telling history.”

It will indeed be interesting to see all the myriad of tweets compiled in one place.

And the impact of social tools on the various protests in the Mideast will definitely be great fodder for some historian in the future.

That said, some think the focus on Silicon Valley social tools, such as Twitter and Facebook, rather than on the people’s will, is overhyped.

Still, social networking is simply a reflection of humanity, so examining its impact is well worth a read.

Plus, tweets are only 140 characters, so it is an easy one too.

Here is the press release on the book:

TWEETS FROM TAHRIR

Egypt’s Revolution as It Unfolded, in the Words of the People Who Made It

Edited by NADIA IDLE and ALEX NUNNS

With a foreword by AHDAF SOUEIF

Gsquare86M Gigi Ibrahim
Everyone in Cairo who wants Mubarak out and stands for justice come to Tahrir NOW!
Feb 2

“Without the new media the Egyptian Revolution could not have happened in the way that it did. The causes of the revolution were many; deep-rooted and long seated. The turning moment had come–but it was the instant and wide-spread nature of the new media that made it possible to recognise the moment and to push it into such an effective manifestation.”

–Ahdaf Soueif

The Twitter accounts of the activists who brought heady days of revolution to Egypt in January and February this year paint an exhilarating picture of an uprising in real-time. Thousands of young people documented on cell phones every stage of the action, as it happened. This book brings together a selection of key tweets in a compelling, fast-paced narrative, allowing the story of the uprising to be told directly by the people in Tahrir Square.

Some of the activists were ‘citizen journalists’, using Twitter to report on what was happening. Others used the social network to organize, communicating the next steps necessary for the revolution to move forward. Nearly everyone online gave instant reactions to the extraordinary events occurring before their eyes.

History has never before been recorded in this fashion. The tweet limit of 140 characters evidently concentrated the feelings of those using Twitter. Raw emotions burst from their messages, whether frantic alarm at attacks from pro-government thugs or delirious happiness at the fall of the dictator. To read these tweets is to embark a rollercoaster ride, from the surprise and excitement of the first demonstration, to the horror of the violence that claimed hundreds of lives, to the final ecstasy of victory.

Many of those tweeting also took photographs with their phones and these are used to illustrate the book, providing remarkable snapshots from the heart of the action.

Edited by young activists Alex Nunns and Nadia Idle, an Egyptian who was in Tahrir Square when Mubarak fell, Tweets from Tahrir is a highly original take on one of the most important and dramatic events in recent world politics. The result is as gripping as any thriller–but it’s all real.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

The movie was nominated for best picture, while Jesse Eisenberg was nominated for best actor for his portrayal of Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, David Fincher for best director and Aaron Sorkin for adapted screenplay.

We probably won’t be seeing the famously underdressed Zuckerberg in a tux anytime soon. Given the film was unauthorized and took liberties with all-too-recent history, it’s highly unlikely he would attend the awards show. But Zuckerberg has had more of a sense of humor about the movie than might be expected–he rented out a local theater so he and his staff could watch the film on opening day, and has said in interviews that the creators did get his hoodies and T-shirts right, if nothing else.

“The Social Network” was also picked as a finalist for the Academy Award in cinematography, film editing, original score and sound mixing.

But it wasn’t the most-lauded film of the morning. “The King’s Speech” had 12 Oscar nominations and “True Grit” had 10.

“The Social Network” has already won Golden Globes for best picture (drama), best director, best screenplay and best original score, as well as a pile of film critics’ awards.

“The next generation of Windows is going to evolve on new hardware,” said Windows unit President Steven Sinofsky.

Before the demo though, Sinofsky traced the history of Windows, noting that from 1992 through Windows Vista the system requirements increased significantly from one version to the next. With Windows 7, though, Microsoft held most technical requirements steady and even lowered some of them.

As for the demo of the new stuff, Sinofsky began with a few caveats.

“We are calling this a technology demonstration,” he said, cautioning it wouldn’t show any new user face stuff or address pricing, timing, etc.

Sinofsky said it is too soon to talk about what requirements will be for the next version of Windows, but said the company is keenly aware of the need to have Windows running on ever-smaller devices.

Update 1:25 pm Microsoft has three demos and it is saving Windows on ARM for last. It’s starting by hoeing off some new PCs running on the current version of Windows–Windows 7.

The second demo will be an update of touch input on Microsoft’s tabletop Surface computer, and the final one will show Windows running on ARM.

1:33 pm The next-generation Surface is thinner and uses infrared cameras inside the screen’s pixels instead of a big projector, allowing for devices that can be either a tabletop or mounted vertically. It will be cheaper as well, though Microsoft doesn’t say how much the machines will cost. First-generation Surface machines had a price tag in the thousands of dollars.

On to the chip demos.

Microsoft starts by showing a development board using a next-generation Intel design running Quicken.

Okay, nod to Intel complete.

Next up is Office running on an ARM chip. This demo is on Microsoft Word and has it printing to an Epson printer. Microsoft shows demos of chips from Qualcomm, Nvidia and Texas Instruments.

On the Nvidia machine, Microsoft shows hardware, accelerated browsing in IE9 running on a Tegra 2 processor, as well as running PowerPoint and an “Iron Man” movie preview.

1:48 pm Asked by Mobilized what work still needs to take place to make Windows on ARM a reality, Sinofsky says that it is the case that programs compiled for x86 processors won’t immediately run on ARM chips, but said the company isn’t ready to talk about the programming model. He does say it is unlikely Microsoft would use virtualization to make old programs, suggesting there will be some work for developers.

Sinfosky says that Microsoft has done the work to enable Windows to run and create a framework for third parties to build software and device drivers.

As for the timing, Sinofsky doesn’t give a date, but does reiterate that Microsoft these days aims to have a new release of Windows every 24 months to 36 months. “I don’t think it’s that long away,” he says. He notes some people want Windows releases faster while other large customers would rather have more time between releases. “Somewhere [around] 24 to 36 months between releases seems about right.”

The ARM compatibility will go into the next release of Windows, but Sinofsky takes time to point out to Mobilized that once again, he isn’t calling it Windows 8.

“This is the next generation of Windows,” he says.

Many years ago, before Google went public, I had an unusual late-night conversation in the lobby of the TED conference with its co-founder Larry Page about the prospect, about which–despite its inevitability–he had more than a little nervousness.

That would be: Taking the search company public.

After much ruminating, Page concluded that one of the more important reasons he felt compelled to have an IPO was to finally reward Google’s employees for all the work they had done to build the company.

While I have never had a similar chat with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the powerful social networking company and an initial public offering, I suspect that he would not express any such sentiment.

And it’s not because Zuckerberg does not value his staffers any less than Page did–instead, it’s because he seems to value his privacy most of all.

I know–ironic!–given how many perceive the company to be cavalier about important issues related to disclosures of personal information uploaded to Facebook by the mountain-load daily by its hundreds of millions of users.

That aside, Zuckerberg’s clear intent to keep the lid on Facebook tight–with no information about the details of financial performance and other pertinent information a public offering would require be disclosed–is clearly about to become a nettlesome issue for the company.

While that effort at preserving secrecy by staying private has resulted in little more than cute Silicon Valley media guessing games about a possible IPO, its most recent machinations are too clever by a half.

That would be the new and giant investment from Goldman Sachs, as well as a deal to get $1.5 billion of pre-IPO shares in the hands of the investment bank’s rich customers.

Aside from the appalling image that only the very wealthy can get an early shot at Facebook shares, which instantly became a press meme yesterday after the Goldman deal was announced, pretending this single investment entity–called a “special purpose vehicle”–simply feels like a Wall Street trick.

Plus, a special purpose vehicle sounds like a car that bankers use to take people for a ride.

Thus, a gaggle of rich doctors in New Jersey are treated like one blob, instead of what is plainly true to all. As the old Latin legal phrase goes: Res ipsa loquitur (the thing speaks for itself).

Of course, this strategic move is designed to keep the number of primary stockholders under 500, which is the IPO tipping point for the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Therefore, by all means, let’s do it!

Or not, because I had an intense déjà vu about all this, and an unease that it felt vaguely familiar as a negative characteristic of Zuckerberg’s leadership that seems to cling to him.

That would be the dicey origins of Facebook, which remain a controversy to this day, including garnering an entire Hollywood movie on the subject.

Anyone with a passing knowledge of Facebook’s history knows the basic question: Did Mark Zuckerberg “steal” the idea for Facebook from the Winklevoss twins, as well as sandbag their efforts, while they were all students at Harvard University?

And, more to the point, was it illegal?

The Winklevii certainly think so, continuing in their Don Quixote quest to take Zuckerberg down in a series of ever-more-comical lawsuits.

For me, the answer is a lot more complex–I think Zuckerberg most definitely screwed with the Olympic rowing twins and it was very creepy that he did.

But, in terms of breaking the law, not so much.

Of course, if you are endeavoring to always act with ethics in your career, this should not be the bar set. But in practical terms, it was most definitely an aggressive knee-capping that is not uncommon in business.

Zuckerberg has shown similar tendencies many times since then, especially around the thorny issues of privacy, where fast-and-loose behaviors are quickly followed by the I’m-sorry-I-didn’t-mean-it excuses.

Okay, fine, I get it. Business is war.

But, as it moves into a more mature place, the question now is whether Facebook should keep stressing this kind of wink-wink-nudge-nudge propensity, because it feels–how can I say this in the nicest way–icky.

Plus it will surely attract unneeded attention from the SEC, which is already looking into the opaque market for trading shares of closely held companies and where Facebook is the star attraction.

And this is to say nothing of other issues–for example, could there be insider trading problems around the buying and selling of these private shares, as one person close to the situation has noted to me?

Facebook, of course, will defend what it is doing as above board, say it’s not unfair to give special access to its bounty to the very rich in what is essentially a private IPO and wag a finger at critics like me and tell us we don’t understand sophisticated financial issues.

But here’s what I grok without a Harvard Business School degree: It feels sneaky, it feels elite, it feels opaque, and this kind of fancy financing footwork could end in tears.

Because these legitimate questions on how Facebook handles its stock will continue to dog the company until–when he is good and ready (and finances at Facebook look prettier)–Zuckerberg eventually pulls the trigger on an IPO.

It would be nice, even if Wall Street applauds his cleverness, if he didn’t keep shooting himself in the foot along the way.

Etacts, which participated in the Y Combinator program earlier this year, offered a free Web app and plug-ins that helped Gmail and IMAP users manage their email relationships by showing information about their contacts’ social Web activity and communication history.

The start-up, co-founded by recent Duke grads Howie Liu and Evan Beard, had raised $650,000 in funding from Ron Conway of SV Angels, Eric Hahn of Inventures Group, Jim Young from Hot or Not, Lorenzo Thione and Barney Pell from Powerset, Joshua Schachter from Delicious, and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim. And I believe Ashton Kutcher was involved as well.

Etacts will no longer accept user sign-ups as of today and will delete all user data effective January 31, it said in an email sent to users.

Etacts’s product was quite similar to that of another Y Combinator company, Rapportive. Salesforce also just bought another YC company this month, Heroku, for $212 million in cash.

Palm-CEO-turned-HP-exec Jon Rubinstein and Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs faced off with Kara Swisher of All Things Digital at a Churchill Club event last night in an entertaining discussion on the future of mobile tech.

If you missed the live video feed of the event, check back with us–we’re working to repost the video. For those who want to read text, here is my liveblog of the event.

6:48 pm PT: We’re just finishing dinner. It was a chicken in some sort of puff pastry. Nothing is happening onstage, as if that wasn’t clear by the fact I am describing the meal. I think they will get started around 7:15 or so.

7:10 pm: Just about ready to go, with intros going on now. (And I just stole Kara’s seat at the head table.)

Kara: They’re both guys. Paul is taller and they work in tech.

7:14 pm: The plan is to talk about the future, but the event begins with a trip down memory lane as Jacobs holds up the Qualcomm PDQ–arguably the first smartphone combining a cellphone and Palm Pilot. For those who don’t remember, it it was bigger than a Palm Pilot and a huge phone strapped together.

7:20 pm: Digital device history continues. We’ve traced the last decade in digital devices, from the iPod through the Treo and iPhone. Don’t forget ringtones and cellphone bowling, Jacobs reminds us, referring to the Brew operating environment that Qualcomm developed.

The iPhone changed everything, Jacobs says, because it showed that the phone makers just weren’t putting enough work into the phone’s user interface.

7:28 pm: Talk is shifting to where we are today. What are the key things that are shifting? User interfaces, touch, etc. “The other things we are seeing is all of our lives are moving into the cloud,” Rubinstein says. On the limitation side, Jacobs points to the limitations of bandwidth: “We don’t have enough spectrum right now,” Jacobs says, adding that the industry and government are working on it. ‘We are just going to have to be more creative about how we get content to the devices.”

The other big limitation, Jacobs says, is battery life. You can do all this cool stuff on your phone, but then the battery dies three-quarters of the way through the day. He puts in a plug for Mirasol–Qualcomm’s low-power display technology.

Rubinstein concurs that battery and bandwidth are the two biggest issues. “Battery technology has not progressed at the same rate as all of the other things we are trying to do,” Rubinstein says.

7:38 pm: What about all the operating systems out there, Kara asks. Rubinstein: “There’s plenty of room in the market for multiple systems,” he says, adding it won’t be like PCs, where one operating system dominates. “It’s just different today.”

Rubinstein says it’s still the infancy of the major transition. Put on the spot to rank the operating systems, Rubinstein says that clearly Apple and Android are going gangbusters. The battle, he says, is for who is going to be No. 3. “We’d sure like to be that.”

Jacobs: “I agree. It’s very early days to be calling winners and losers.” He sees pretty wide diversity of operating systems, at least for the next five years, unless the operators really clamp down. Even then, there are some alternate distribution channels emerging. Either way, Qualcomm’s in good shape as an arms dealer, he points out.

7:45 pm: Discussion of carriers. While they are immensely powerful, Rubinstein says they won’t be the only distribution channel for every wireless device. “They are not all going to go through the carriers,” Rubinstein says.

More and more screens will emerge, Rubinstein says. If I fast-forward enough years, he says, the walls are going to be big displays capable of talking to other devices.

Jacobs notes that people will be able to use their device with any tool they have access to, from a big screen to a headset to a wireless keyboard. He says Qualcomm is working on a technology that would allow wireless headsets that could work in-ear like a hearing aid.

7:50 pm: Talk about some outlandish things. Rubinstein has already thrown out the idea of a headset in your pillow. Rubinstein points out that there will be a lot of sensors, pointing to the Nike+iPod as a really early example of what we can expect a lot more of.

7:55 pm: Augmented reality is also going to be big, the panelists agree. “The (StarTrek) tricorder is going to happen,” Jacobs says. Health care will also tap mobile technology, particularly in emerging countries where there is less regulation, carriers are trusted and there are fewer skilled health care providers available. “It’s a very efficient way to manage health,” he says. “Over the next few years we will see this happen,” he says. Eventually it will come back to developed markets, but today there is too much legacy and too much regulation in places like the U.S.

8:10 pm: Sorry for the delay–we were fixing some issues with the video coding, which hopefully should be solved now. Anyway, Rubinstein and Jacobs have been throwing out things that they expect in the next five years.

Jacobs’s list includes digital networked textbooks, cellphones as gateways for health care, as well as using augmented reality to translate all the signs and menus in a foreign country.

Rubinstein and Jacobs both see a digital wallet becoming a reality, with Jacobs throwing out the idea of an end to checkout lines as the phone could pay and the store could electronically disable the security on goods, allowing the whole transaction to take place without interaction with store personnel.

“Legal shoplifting, that’s interesting.” Kara says.

The technical hurdles aren’t that big, Rubinstein says. “Clearly NFC (near-field communications) is coming.” It’s more of a social problem than a technical one, Rubinstein says.

8:21 pm: Some good audience questions. One, on what does it take to deliver an Apple-like experience. Rubinstein, who has experience as part of Apple and trying to “out-Apple” Apple, says he thinks that the key is delivering an intergrated experience.

“I don’t think Apple is the only one that can do it, but I do think it is important to have all the elements,” he says.

Another question is on the future of mobile TV–a question that prompts Jacobs to cover his face (Qualcomm spent a bundle on its MediaFlo mobile TV service that saw very limited consumer uptake and Qualcomm is now evaluating what to do with it).

Too few people liked what the service had to offer, Jacobs says, referring to limits on content, screen size, etc. Jacobs said it appears that probably broadcast makes sense for live events, while streaming with TiVo-like controls makes sense for everything else.

“I actually believe strongly in mobile TV, still,” he says.

8:30 pm: Okay. That’s a wrap from me. Thanks for tuning in. If you want to hear more from Rubinstein, he will be speaking at next week’s D: Dive Into Mobile conference.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zuck brings on Andrew Bosworth to demo the product.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Question from audience: Will you add voice or video?

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

Question from audience: Will you have contextual ads?

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

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

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

Boz: Users can delete any message.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Question: What about Facebook employee email addresses?

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

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

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

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

Boz: Not yet, but it’s imaginable.

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

Question: Storage?

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

Okay, they’re cutting us off.

Here’s the Facebook blog post on the announcement.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

If the journey was steady, though, the communication was anything but. Google (GOOG) has shifted its language along the way and even outright denied the smartphone project once or twice.

The Nexus One, news of which got out a few weeks ago, might not be the innovative free-to-all everyone was fantasizing about, but it represents the most significant mobile announcement from Google to date, using its Android operating system software.

More to the point, Nexus One, the Silicon Valley search giant’s most aggressive attack on the hegemony of Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, will finally be unveiled today at an event that will be ably covered by Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski, starting at about 10 am PT.

But overall, it was a pretty sneaky journey from there to here.

So, here is the visual history, using our new All Things Digital slideshow format.

While Internet companies such as Google use baked goods as names for their key strategic initiatives–recent ones related to its Android mobile operating system were called Donut and Eclair, for example–aggressive media giant News Corp. is definitely not going for sweetness in its unusual selection of a code name for its high-profile digital content effort.

That would be Project Alesia, a moniker that comes from a vicious siege from ancient times widely considered to be one of the more decisive battles in history.

And that is apparently what top News Corp. (NWS) execs think is the best way to describe their plans for stopping the decimation of premium content in the digital age and transforming their business to take advantage of new means of distribution, according to numerous sources BoomTown spoke to this week about the unusual name.

“It takes a lot of determination to succeed in what is one of the biggest challenges newspaper and all media has ever faced,” explained one source. “So, the real path to success will require ingenuity and staying on course over time…which was critical to that military victory.”

Interestingly, said several sources, the Project Alesia name was picked by James Murdoch, chairman and CEO of Europe and Asia for News Corp.

Widely considered the heir apparent to his father, News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch is apparently a dedicated reader and student of Roman history.

But it has actually been the elder Murdoch who has been cast as the obvious general so far, conducting a recent series of public verbal attacks on Internet targets, especially Google (GOOG).

He has accused the search giant of “stealing” content, for example, while other News Corp. execs have echoed his gibes in various high-profile forums.

But James Murdoch has been a key player behind the scenes in the digital strategy, several sources said, an effort that also includes News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller and Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. unit Dow Jones owns this site.)

Of this top group, it is James Murdoch–who has slowly been emerging as a more high-profile player, especially internationally–who found inspiration in the past.

To understand why, you’ll first need a short and truncated history lesson, which I culled from a variety of sources online and off:

Taking place in September 52 BC in what is now France, the Siege of Alesia (also referred to as the Battle of Alesia) pitted Rome’s famed leader, Julius Caesar, against the Gallic tribes under the unified command of Vercingétorix of Averni.

More important–besides being cited as one of the best uses of siege warfare and “circumvallation” (see more about this below)–the battle of Alesia is considered a turning point in the bitter wars conducted by the Roman Republic to tame the Gauls, who had finally united as a single force in opposition to the Roman invasion.

The hard-fought win–in a battle where the Roman army was outnumbered five-to-one, outside a hilltop fort in Alesia–is often credited with reinvigorating Rome’s power over Gaul. After the loss, Gaul became a province of the Roman empire and was pretty much subdued for the next 500 years.

Alesia is often cited as one of Caesar’s greatest military victories and the fallout from it later led to his ascension to ultimate power in Rome (which was soon followed by his infamous assassination).

That’s not the ultimate end News Corp. is envisioning, of course, sticking with Alesia’s main themes of “perseverance” and innovation, said several people with knowledge of the digital content efforts.

And, no surprise, in the digital battles between traditional media and interlopers from the Web, guess who has been cast as noble Caesar and who plays the role of marauding heathens?

You know, the ones who even cast their women and children out of the fort into the middle of the siege when food started to run out? That would apparently be the Googlers of Silicon Valley, although if it were them, the food would be organic!

Not all comparisons are the same, said a source. For example, consider circumvallation, which is essentially the building of a series of encircling fortified walls around the enemy. Contravallation is also also part of the strategy, to protect from attacks by enemy reinforcements attacking from the outside.

One could easily imagine that this means creating pay walls around premium content or de-indexing it from search sites like Google, both of which News Corp. has publicly talked about doing.

Not so!

“Traditional media companies are interested in investing in innovation too, so the idea of just putting up walls around content is a red herring,” said the source. “The idea is to find new ways of distributing media that also makes money, because why should journalism in [digital] ones and zeros be any different?”

Of course, with new stats showing sites like Google News and Yahoo (YHOO) News as the place consumers are going to get more and more of their news, that is a big issue in a longer fight, which will grind on for a very long time and well before any side can ever declare victory.

And here is a clip from a 2001 movie, “Vercingétorix,” about the Siege of Alesia, not made by News Corp.’s 20th Century Fox Hollywood studio, starring that actor dude from “Highlander” (aka my fave movie of all time). It does not end well for Google, oops, the Gauls:

[The 1899 painting at the top is by Lionel-Noël Royer.]

In your recent Firefox review, you said Internet Explorer has a private browsing mode that doesn’t record your history or tracks while surfing. But I can’t find how to turn it on.

The feature, which is called InPrivate Browsing, is only available in the latest version of IE, called IE8. You turn it on by either selecting that option from the Safety button at the upper right, or from the Tools menu in the Menu Bar if you have chosen to make that bar visible. Once you do, an “InPrivate” label appears at the top left corner of the browser and a page appears explaining that the browser won’t record on your own PC certain records of what you do in that browsing session. There’s an additional privacy mode, available from the same two drop-down menus, called “InPrivate Filtering,” which goes further. It blocks Web sites you go to from saving certain records of your presence there on their own servers. InPrivate browsing lasts until you close the InPrivate browsing window.

When you reviewed the latest Safari Web browser awhile back, you complained that Apple had repositioned the tabs in a way that made them harder to see. A friend said that’s no longer true. Is he right?

Yes. After getting a lot of negative reaction, Apple changed Safari 4’s design so the tabs are displayed in the previous manner, below the toolbar, instead of at the very top. The company also made more visible the page-loading indicator, though I personally still prefer the indicator style used in prior versions.

In your column last week, you recommended add-on software to search documents for key words in Windows XP. Is there any similar software that will do the same for Macs?

It’s unnecessary on Mac because the Mac operating system comes with a fast, comprehensive search system called Spotlight that’s built right in. Windows Vista also has a very good search system built in. The reason I recommended add-on software for Windows XP is that I consider XP’s built-in search to be slow and inferior to those in these two newer operating systems.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online for free at the All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

The Obama administration is no longer using Google’s (GOOG) video player to deliver the President’s weekly addresses online. Instead, it will use an Akamai (AKAM) player. No reason has yet been given for the abrupt switch, although some speculate it was inspired by privacy concerns over the video-sharing site.

As many privacy advocates noted when the White House first began relying on it, YouTube uses cookies that can track visitors even if they never actually play the video. “Whenever you follow a link, or download an embedded or off-site resource, your browser sends a referer header (sic) that tells the Web site what Web page you came from,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains. “And whenever you load any document, your browser may send cookies that show whether you’ve visited the same site before, and that may even identify you directly. For instance, if you’re logged into YouTube and you watch an embedded YouTube video on some other site, YouTube can still recognize you because your browser will still send a personalized YouTube cookie. This means that loading an embedded video from within a blog could enable the video hosting site (and, in some cases, its advertising partners) to compile a history of which blog entries you were reading and when–even if you didn’t try to play the video.”

And this was the case with the President’s weekly addresses as delivered via YouTube. Not an ideal situation for the administration, and one that it quickly sought to remedy. Shortly after the initial outcry over the issue, the White House rolled out a technical fix that limited that tracking ability only to those who watched the President’s weekly address. But that was really just a band-aid. This latest move seems far more definitive, as the Akamai player uses no tracking cookies whatsoever.

UPDATE: The White House says it has not abandoned YouTube. It’s simply testing a new player.

“As the president continues his goal of making government more accessible and transparent, this week we tested a new way of presenting the president’s weekly address by using a player developed in-house,” a White House spokesman said in a statement. “This decision is more about better understanding our internal capabilities than it is a position on third-party solutions or a policy. The weekly address was also published in third-party video hosting communities and we will likely continue to embed videos from these services on WhiteHouse.gov in the future.”

This week I tested two free tools that attempt to make your Web searches more relevant by learning from users’ reactions to search results: Google’s SearchWiki and Surf Canyon Inc.’s namesake tool for Web browsers. These two don’t necessarily compete against each other; in fact, they can be used in tandem. But after initially entering a search query, SearchWiki requires additional work on the part of the user that many people may not want to do. Surf Canyon works automatically as you go, sorting results according to real-time user behavior.

SearchWiki depends on people to rank their own search results by promoting favored URLs to the top of a screen and knocking others to the bottom. It is available to most people who are logged into a Google account, and these user preferences are remembered if the same searches are performed at other times.

This sorting is done using elegant animation; preferred URLs float to the top of the screen when selected and unwanted results disappear in a magic-trick-like poof when removed. Comments about a link can be typed into a word bubble beside the URL and all comments are available to the public, labeled as posted by “Searcher” unless you create another nickname for yourself. People can also add preferred URLs to a search-results page if, for example, they know a better link about something than those that show up.

Google’s SearchWiki

But who wants to do all this work? Google (GOOG) says your votes don’t influence the way other Google users see search results, nor do they affect your search results if you aren’t logged into Google. You can see the number of votes a URL got from fellow voters, as well as comments made about the URL — but only after you select a link at the bottom of the search-results page. If you promote a URL, you’ll automatically see what other people think about this link.

For your efforts, you’ll create a small collection of results that are saved in your account, sorted by date and time should you ever want to revisit them. This could come in handy in some circumstances, such as if you were researching a topic and you forgot to save Web pages as you went. Google confusingly calls these “SearchWiki notes,” though they really include all of the links you voted on, as well as typed-in notes about links.

SearchWiki is a tough sell because most of us are already trained to surf the Web quickly, skipping ahead and back through links without taking the time to rank those results or comment on them. And it only works with Google searches.

If you like the idea of more personalized Web searches but would like to use other search engines or don’t want to do extra work, you might like Surf Canyon. Once downloaded, this tool displays bull’s-eyes beside certain results to show that Surf Canyon has found additional related hits. Clicking on this bull’s-eye reveals those suggested links, pulled from deeper down in the search results, and these links might have bull’s-eyes of their own. This cascade of data goes on and on as an algorithm studies which of the returned results you do or don’t choose.

You might be deterred from using Surf Canyon because it must be downloaded before it works on Internet Explorer or Firefox. (A version of Surf Canyon for Apple’s (AAPL) Safari browser is due out within a month.) This tool works with Google, Yahoo (YHOO), Microsoft Live Search (MSFT) and Craigslist, and just started working with LexisNexis’s LexisWeb.com legal-search engine.

Surf Canyon might not seem to be doing much at first, but it changes and reflects your preferences as you make them. For example, a search for “Obama dog” originally returned results about how the President-elect and his family are narrowing their search for a puppy. But as I opened more links related specifically to Mr. Obama’s daughters, more results appeared on screen about Sasha and Malia. Each time I hit the browser’s Back button to return to the original search page, Surf Canyon offered a new set of relevant URLs.

I tried looking at Craigslist.com for last-minute inauguration tickets, and one hit listed an inauguration-appropriate dress that someone was giving away free. The Surf Canyon bull’s-eye appeared beside this result, and when I selected it, three more dress listings appeared.

Surf Canyon recently released an option for users who want long-term personalization, found at my.surfcanyon.com. It lets people select sources from which they prefer to receive news, shopping, research, or sports and entertainment results. Individual sites not listed on this page can also be added to a list of sources to use; likewise, sites can be added to a blacklist so results never come from them.

Unlike Google, Surf Canyon doesn’t save your history or usage profile. And if you haven’t created personalized preferences using the link above, it responds solely using your as-they-happen signals, like when you choose one link over another.

Google’s SearchWiki is asking users to do extra work, which may not be practical for many users. But if you do use it, this tool’s personalized, saved results could be a real boon. Surf Canyon worked well for me with multiple search engines, retrieving data from result pages I likely wouldn’t have opened. Either way, your days of futile Web searching are numbered.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

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

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