Social media tools are the latest in a long line of time-stealers in the workplace, following in the footsteps of March Madness brackets, afternoon golf games, morning water cooler gossip or cigarette breaks. But social media like Twitter and Facebook are more visible from a distance (of both time and space), so they are easier to criticize and quantify.

– Dwane Lay, human resources director at Missouri Baptist Medical Center

And by you, I mean me.

The event, at the Marriott Copley Place downtown, is just getting under way. I won’t bore you with every detail, but will post whenever things get interesting.

In the meantime, enjoy this take on Angry Birds for the BlackBerry.

Update, 10:17 am ET: The intro is still going on. RIM Vice President Alec Taylor is talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis for some reason. However, RIM was nice enough to pass out slides for the whole day. Here are some of the highlights:

BlackBerry Mobile Voice System
Launching in early 2011, this is an update to RIM’s effort to unify the desk and mobile phone, offering a single identity, voiceover Wi-Fi calling, a single voicemail box, dialing office extensions and more. RIM says the new version will support more types of business phone systems.

Other features coming later this year include automatic hand-off from Wi-Fi to mobile networks, a “move call from desk” feature and more.

BlackBerry Balance
A new effort to support mixing personal and corporate data on the BlackBerry. RIM is adding features such as the ability for IT to choose to wipe only corporate information from a device or to limit users from cutting work data and pasting it into a personal application or email. Other features include warnings when sending emails or calendar invites outside of the organization, the ability to encrypt media cards and options for preventing access to work data by third-party applications.

BlackBerry client for Microsoft SharePoint
Launching in early 2011, this will bring data from Microsoft’s portal software directly to BlackBerry handhelds. It will work with both the 2007 and 2010 versions of SharePoint and integrates into a number of BlackBerry programs, including E-mail, calendar, Documents To Go and the browser.

PlayBook
As for the forthcoming tablet, RIM says it will ship with 1GB of memory, have 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of flash memory, include a 3-megapixel front-facing and 5-megapixel rear-facing camera and have micro USB and Micro HDMI ports. (I can’t remember if they have said all of that before.) The slides say only that it will ship this quarter and will be “competitively priced,” reiterating past company positioning.

According to the slides, the company also plans to talk about cloud-based device management and changes to allow one BlackBerry server to support multiple corporations.

10:35 am ET: The Cuban Missile Crisis is apparently over, and VP Pete Devenyi is now outlining the company’s business product road map and making the pitch for its strategy.

“We really do have a great story,” he says, noting that the enterprise is different from the “arms race” of the consumer market.

“It’s not just about the number of apps in App world,” he says, noting that businesses can and are building programs just for use within the corporation. Some businesses, he says, have hundreds of internal apps, none of which show up in the public storefront. BlackBerry, he says, also allows businesses better control than rivals over what programs are on a worker’s device. For example, Devenyi says, when workers change groups within a company, the programs they have access to can be updated automatically with programs deleted and added from their devices.

“That kind of power is power that no one else has,” he says. “We don’t read about that much.”

10:43 am: In addition to both the paid BlackBerry Enterprise Server and the slimmed-down free “Express” version of the server, RIM plans to launch an email system aimed directly at small-to-midsize businesses–MDaemon Messaging Server, BlackBerry Edition. The idea is to give smaller businesses a full email server that has full BlackBerry support. The product stems from an acquisition RIM made a year or two ago and offers what RIM says are features similar to Microsoft’s Exchange Server but at a fraction of the price.

The company is also launching “very, very soon” a modest update to its flagship server product, BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0.3. It will add more support for employee-owned devices (including the BlackBerry Balance feature described earlier), support for encrypted attachments and certification for Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and the latest version, known as Lync 2010.

11:18 am: RIM is launching yet another server this year, known as the BlackBerry Enterprise Application Middleware (BEAM). BEAM, which companies would have to buy in addition to their BlackBerry email server, aims to streamline enterprise content for use on a BlackBerry. ‘What that results in is a much more efficient application than you would otherwise have,” Devenyi says. It’s in beta now, he adds.

11:25 am: BlackBerry is launching its equivalent of Find My Phone, known as BlackBerry Protect, which will allow individuals to remotely wipe or post a message if a device is lost. Protect will launch later this year, Devenyi says.

Finally, the company is talking about a number of changes it is making to the core BlackBerry Enterprise Server so that it can run via the cloud. Launching later this year, RIM will have the ability for its server product to be remotely hosted and support more than one business. It’s not clear yet if this will be RIM offering BlackBerry as a cloud-based service or if this is a product for hosting partners, though it sounds more like the latter.

11:32 am: Devenyi told Mobilized that the company is just showing the architectural changes it is making, not saying how it will bring the cloud-based capabilities to market. “We’re still working through a number of those details ourselves.” Devenyi said. “It could be both, but we are not announcing.”

11:42 am: On to the PlayBook finally. Senior Product manager Ryan Bidan gives the spiel. He says there is a lot that the company isn’t ready to share. Addressing concerns around battery life, Bidan notes the PlayBook has a 5300-miliamp battery, but doesn’t give specifics on how much battery life that will translate to.

“We’ll have good battery life,” he says. “Don’t worry about the battery life.”

Other details:
Software updates will be pushed down to the device on an ongoing basis. There will be a version of App World on the device for downloading developer-created programs.

And with that, the formal part of the event is over.

Facebook-branded Vitaminwater

Those smug smarties from Palo Alto, Calif. (disclosure: my husband works there part-time, so I can say that with some bit of certainty) say they love the openness and cooperativeness of internal Facebook culture, according to Glassdoor (as well as the free food and commuter shuttles).

This is the first time Facebook has made the Glassdoor list. In second place is Southwest Airlines–which was last year’s winner–followed by Bain & Company, General Mills and Edelman, respectively.

As for other tech companies, SAS Institute placed No. 7, Overstock.com was No. 9 and CareerBuilder No. 11. Apple was No. 20 and Google No. 30.

Meanwhile, in more surprising news, Glassdoor reports that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is actually more popular now than founder Jerry Yang when he was in the top spot. Bartz has an employee approval rating of 56 percent, compared to 34 percent for Yang when he left.

Other comparisons: HP CEO Léo Apotheker has 62 percent approval, compared to Mark Hurd’s 34 percent when he left, and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has 71 percent approval, compared to Randy Falco’s 13 percent approval when he left.

The most popular tech CEO is Apple’s Steve Jobs, with a 97 percent approval rating. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Eric Schmidt are both at 96 percent.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Because while those who live in the echo chamber of Silicon Valley are frequently wrong, but never in doubt, a gigantic amount of time is spent being more technical than realistic.

And by “technical,” I mean annoyingly detailed in making a point as to completely obfuscate the essence of anything.

Let me explain.

In the middle of yet another dullish release of features–this time mobile-related–at an event at Facebook HQ in Palo Alto, Calif., on Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and CEO of the social networking giant, finally livened up the proceedings in the Q&A part at the end.

Ben Parr of Mashable asked a question everyone has been speculating about recently–whether and when there would be an iPad app for Facebook coming.

A fumbling “no comment” would have worked fine, but the real Zuckerberg seemed to have decided to channel the clever Aaron Sorkin-ish repartee of the fictional Zuckerberg in the movie “The Social Network.”

“It’s not mobile…it is a computer,” he said flatly.

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

“Well, sorry,” Zuckerberg spat out, his voice dripping with the kind of sarcasm that only a super-nerdy Silicon Valley engineer can pull off properly.

And, while he quickly backtracked and declared a deep love of Apple products, it was clear Zuckerberg meant what he’d said and said what he’d meant.

That the iPad is just another version of the kind of computer he cut his geek teeth on and it is not at all like the mobile smartphones that are now moving squarely into power pole position in the digital universe.

Except, not so fast.

First, the creators of the iPad over at Apple do consider it mobile, and its own often-disdainful leader Steve Jobs has said so on many occasions.

While that does not make it so, of course, imagine if he got up and said Facebook was not actually a social network as much as, say, a glorified portal with more chitchat. Sort of an AOL-Plus!

You could make that argument, although it would not take into account a lot of key elements Zuckerberg did not take into account in his iPad-is-a-computer zinger.

But that’s not a good enough counter, of course, so let’s focus on real people using the iPad or tablets like it, such as the Amazon Kindle e-reader.

First, the iPad is a computer, because that is technically true, even though that makes a smartphone a computer too. (And, now that I think of it, my car is a computer.)

But actual civilians don’t make these kinds of distinctions and, if one spends any time watching consumers use tablets, mobile is entirely how they think of it.

If you want to get technical, I supposed “portable” is a better way to describe it, but not in the way a laptop is.

And here are the five simple reasons why:

No. 1: A tablet is typically carried around like a book or magazine, which are perhaps the most portable of all media.

While it has a hard shell, an iPad has the elements of those much more so than a computer laptop, which is much harder to manipulate, due to its clamshell design and keyboard.

No. 2: A tablet is largely used via a touchscreen, which allows the device to be intimate in a way a computer never is.

Watch people use a laptop and an iPad in a public setting and you will easily see the relationship is much different.

A laptop is treated more as a work device and an in-a-pinch entertainment player. Like a phone, the tablet is used close in and with no sense of boundaries.

No. 3: A tablet is largely used as a consumption device, with interactive and inputting elements, while a computer is an interactive and inputting device with consumption elements.

No. 4: The tablet, like my phone, is always on, with no boot up. It is persistent, while a computer is more periodic.

And a tablet is smaller and thinner than any computer and will only get thinner over time. Again, this kind of form factor makes it more and more a mobile device.

No. 5: And, even now, as large as the first iteration of the iPad is, it never sits on my desk.

A desktop computer, of course, does. My laptop sits on my desk, plugged into a big screen, and is often unplugged and taken with me when I travel.

But my iPad is never on my desk. Unless it is charging or synching, it is in my bag with my phone and always ready to go.

As in, mobile.

BoomTown motored on down the lovely Highway 280 in Silicon Valley to Facebook to hear execs talk about a new geo-location feature the powerful social networking site is rolling out today.

And, the new name of the service, which will be deeply integrated into its current update system, as I reported earlier, will be “Places.”

The service seems to be basic and useful–it is reviewed here by Walt Mossberg–allowing people to post their location on the Wall of their Facebook profile, much as you might a photo or video.

There will be no games, no mayors and no special discounts either in Facebook Places–just plain and simple checking in and, presumably, taking names.

Privacy is a big focus of the launch of Places, which will allow users to decline to be placed by others.

The $100 million question is how much Facebook will allow the integration of other competing services including Foursquare.

A lot, it seems, as sources said Foursquare Founder and CEO Dennis Crowley was invited to appear for the announcements, perhaps to minimize the idea that this is a Foursquare-killer.

It’s not. Today.

4:30 pm PT: Of course, I and a badillion other reporters arrived on time, to 1050 Page Mill Road in Palo Alto, Calif. in a mass of media force that would probably better be deployed on more weighty topics than the particulars of checking in from some hip dive bar in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco.

After some waiting, we were finally bussed–or perhaps the better word is geo-located–to the actual HQ of Facebook nearby, and shepherded (just like sheep that we are!) into its cafeteria.

Except it had been duded up like a tiki lounge with palm trees and a driftwood stage. I felt as though I was suddenly on an episode of “Gilligan’s Island.” Cue Ginger for her big song number with the coconut bra!

Hey, Skipper…

5:18 pm: That skipper would be CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who was–as usual–dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and was endearingly awkward as always. It’s kind of touching that Zuckerberg still tries to have the just-us-guys posture, despite all the fame and fortune.

He quickly announced Facebook Places, across the U.S. tomorrow, on an Apple (AAPL) iPhone app and a mobile Web site.

He talked about deciding to finally launch Places after a dinner out with his girlfriend, when, deploying a test version, they realized another Facebook exec, Chris Cox and his fiance were nearby at another restaurant.

It was an earth-shaking moment, implied Zuckerberg.

Ahem, knock, knock…that’s Foursquare! Have you heard of it?

Yes, Facebook has been ogling the hot New York location start-up for a year, which is precisely why we are all here.

5:28 pm: Michael Sharon, the product manager of Places gave us a little run-through of the service, which was about what you would expect.

Foursquare except cleaner. Booyah except no games. Gowalla except, well, not Gowalla.

What’s important is that it is very integrated into Facebook’s current features, such as the Wall and status updates. Which is the right thing to do since Facebook has no business being all trendy.

The plains are covered with the bodies of pioneers, as they say, so what Facebook Places is, essentially, is a fast follow.

Sharon moved onto privacy, the big gorilla in the room. You have to opt-in and agree and click here and default to off and you can only tag your friends and you can also block them too.

Also, per Woody Allen’s “Bananas,” all Facebook citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside, so we can check.

Next, lots of info about APIs, so partners can also be part of Facebook’s geo-locating universe.

Up trotted Gowalla’s CTO and Co-founder Scott Raymond, who showed off Gowalla and Facebook integration.

Then a Foursquare exec–not Crowley, who has apparently checked in at a Chipolte in New York at the time of the places launch–loped up to say how great it all is. Just great! Really! Frankly, what else would the Foursquares say at this point.

Next: Yelp dude. Great! Just great! Integration! Check-in and pull your Facebook friends into the Yelp app.

Of course, it would not be a set without Booyah’s Keith Lee. Loves it! Fun! Just great!

This felt like a slow-moving version of invasion of the geo-location snatchers, a parade of glassy-eyed hostages, some scurvy mates walking the platform plank. Aaaaarrrr.

5:50 pm: Finally, Facebook’s product head Chris Cox, who is perhaps one of the more fetching geeks out there, bounded onstage to be all fetching and smart.

He talked about places like home, work and, um, bars. Well, actually, community locations, quoting Ray Oldenburg.

I was honestly not really listening to him at all, because I was riveted on his new haircut, which is just like the buzzed one Vince got on “Entourage” this season.

Errant thought: Those guys on “Entourage” would never check in from a bar! They are totally busy getting their groove on with the ladies–even Johnny Drama–and chillaxing with the doobies and tequila!

When I checked in again mentally, Cox was still chattering away about some glowing phone that tells you everything that happened in that bar forever and ever, since everyone was checking in and memorializing the place over time.

Good god, isn’t it enough that Facebook has all those drunkey-drunk photos from college students nationwide.

No! It wants it all! Yay, all our our drunkey-drunk moments will now be preserved in check-ins for all eternity!

Honey, remember when I ended up in the gutter here? Fun times for our grandkids to unearth one day!

5:58 pm: The Skipper Zuckerberg was back to moderate the Q&A.

Privacy questions about making private places public. If a lot of people are there, it becomes public.

Next: What up with monetization with deals? Zuckerberg notes that Places is at its starting point and “certainly you can imagine these things in the future.”

There was a question about how Places started. Well, IMHO, the moment when Facebook saw Foursquare’s innovation and freaked out.

A very goofy question about what happens when drunkey-drunk places shut down and all those memories are gone, which made me wonder if the reporter asking was drunkey-drunk.

“That’s not a problem we can solve,” said Cox.

Good answer.

Now, the Skipper wants to show us a Facebook custom, which made me suddenly nervous. Sacrifice of the media? No, just some switch-pulling thing.

There was apparently also another tradition–for a six-year-old company, that is–of hitting some gong.

Aha, it’s “The Gong Show.”

Geo-locate that.

Earlier today, I wrote a piece about how I was one of the 114,000 AT&T customers whose email and device identity numbers had been easily exposed earlier this week via a flaw in the way the company registered the Apple (AAPL) iPad 3G for cellular access.

In my post, I complained that I had yet to hear from the telecom giant about the security snafu and release of my personal email address, which AT&T (T) had yet to acknowledge to those impacted.

Well, the company does read tech blogs, so this morning, this communication from a PR honcho was sent to my work email, which is available on this site publicly.

Regrets? AT&T has a few:

Hi Kara:

I am writing to apologize that your personal e-mail address was made public. As you know, we fixed the flaw that caused this almost as soon as we heard about it from one of our business customers. But that doesn’t change the fact that your personal information was exposed without your permission. That is something we truly regret.

Nothing is more important to us than protecting the privacy of customer information. You should know that in this case, the only thing compromised was your email address and not, for example, the contents of your email or any other personal information. And as you also know, the problem only affected iPad 3G customers. No other mobile devices or customers were involved.

Thanks very much for your patience. Please let me know if there is anything we can do for you or if you have any questions.

Mark Siegel
Executive Director-Media Relations
AT&T
[Address redacted]
[Work phone number redacted]
[Mobile phone number}
[Email address redacted]

As you can see, I used my crack security system–DELETE!–to save Siegel any incursions into his privacy.

And while I do appreciate the reaching out, I still want to hear–as do others affected–officially from AT&T about exactly what’s what.

Siegel told me in a follow-up email: “We are finalizing our plans for communicating with customers.”

(Suggestion to make us happy: A free iPhone 4 might be a sweet gesture. Only kidding!! Sort of.)

In addition, I am not sure, as he wrote in the initial email, whether it is comforting or not that it was only my email and only my iPad 3G that were violated.

That’s sort of like telling me that only one room of my digital house was broken into, although nothing good was taken, so not to worry.

Actually, if that happened in real life, I would still call the police. That is, if the call on my iPhone didn’t drop.

Again, I kid! Sort of.

The Web’s dominant traffic counter is in the midst of overhauling its traffic-counting system in response to years of complaints from publishers who insist that their traffic has been undercounted.

Turns out, the publishers were often right.

ComScore’s old data, for instance, say the Huffington Post attracted 9.95 million unique visitors in December. But its new numbers peg HuffPo’s December traffic at 20 million uniques.

The difference is that comScore’s (SCOR) old system tracked small panels of users and extrapolated their traffic patterns across the Web. But its new “hybrid” system uses panel data along with records generated by actual visits to the site, counted via tracking cookies. Publishers that cooperate with comScore (SCOR) agree to let the company “tag” every Web page on their sites.

“This is a much much better, much more methodologically rigorous way of doing this,” says Linda Abraham, comScore’s chief marketing officer.

ComScore has been rolling out the new system for months and says it can now use it to report on 25 percent of the 50 biggest sites on the Web. Another 50 percent of the top sites have agreed to work with the system, Abraham says.

ComScore lets publishers who are already clients participate in the program for free. But it will charge everyone else $10,000 a year, which the company says helps cover the cost of new servers and other equipment it needs to process the new deluge of data.

UPDATE: Some more detail on comScore’s fees, which generated a Web flare-up after this piece ran. Abraham notes that comScore’s set-up fee is $5,000, which she says covers implementation costs and gives publishers access to its data for six months; comScore charges publishers who want to keep receiving reports an additional $5,000 for each subsequent six-month period. However, Abraham notes, “If you choose not to purchase report access, you are free to do that, and we’ll continue to report you as hybrid, free of charge, as long as you continue to beacon correctly.” For more from Abraham, see her response to Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis’s criticism; here’s the company’s blog post on the subject.

The new system doesn’t necessarily generate a traffic boost. AOL’s (AOL) Living channel saw its numbers decline by two percent in the new system, for instance, and its radio site saw traffic drop by 20 percent. AOL’s overall traffic, though, is up nine percent by comScore’s count.

Hybrid measurement is particularly kind to small Web sites and those that generate a lot of traffic from users who visit while at work. Both categories have always been difficult for comScore to measure using panels.

TheStreet.com (TSCM), for instance, has watched its traffic shoot up 86 percent under the new system, to 3.3 million uniques. That’s still much less than the site itself reports–in its last quarterly filing, the financial network reported an audience of 8.1 million uniques.

The fact that comScore is tracking some Web sites using the new system and the rest of them with the old one will make things a bit sticky for some time. The company has stopped releasing its monthly Top 50 list until May, when it says it will have moved almost all participating sites into the hybrid system.

But some sites won’t end up working with comScore at all, which means that comScore will measure them with its old panel methodology. At some point, the company will be presenting apples-to-oranges numbers when it compares different sites.

Does any of this really matter? Yes and no.

Ad buyers do pay attention to comScore rankings when figuring out where to place their money, even as Web publishers have presented their own, higher numbers from their own server logs. For some sites, the new data will make their pitches more compelling.

On the other hand, this does nothing to solve the real problem facing most publishers: They can’t sell ads against all of their inventory, no matter who’s counting it. And a measurement system won’t ever be able to help with that one.

My time-killing suggestion for the day: AdWeek’s “AdFreak” blog, which is packed with TV ads you probably haven’t seen. Did you know, for instance, that the Kool-Aid man was back?

Or perhaps you’ve wondered what a North Korean beer ad looks like (though honestly, you don’t need to go the full two-and-a-half minutes on this one; 20 seconds is fine):

Or maybe you want to see a guy doing a backflip in a wheelchair, as in this spot for Howstuffworks.com:

One word of warning: Don’t bother with the “Eat Canadian” ad, which is earnest and dull. Save that for Monday, as you’re easing into the week. Enjoy your weekend!

“Steve continues to look forward to returning at the end of June, and there’s nothing further to say.”

– Apple spokeswoman Katie Cotton

A quote from Steve Jobs in an Apple press release this morning and a handful of media reports claiming he has been spotted at Apple HQ over the past few days are raising hopes that the CEO may have officially returned to work.

It’s not clear yet whether these sightings are freak occurrences or if Jobs has indeed come back to work full-time, but we are nearing the end of June, the date at which his medical leave from the company was to conclude. Certainly, it’s conceivable that he’s slowly ramping up for a formal return.

Apple (AAPL) has not yet returned a request for comment.