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The team at Pingdom, a firm that focuses primarily on uptime and performance, has posted a new blog entry estimating that Facebook will overtake MySpace as the top social network in the U.S. within a month or two. That’s largely because, according to the same numbers, Facebook has doubled in size in the past year.

Several months ago, traffic firm ComScore noted that Facebook–a year ago far smaller than the News Corp.-owned MySpace–was starting to pass its rival in worldwide traffic. But in the U.S., which still has the big ad dollars, MySpace remained bigger.

There’s something to note, though: Pingdom used Google Trends to make its assessment. Google Trends traffic data is one of only many sources of statistics out there, and it’s collected primarily from people who have installed the Google toolbar. Numbers from Compete.com, for example, show that MySpace is still ahead.

Even according to Pingdom’s numbers, MySpace doesn’t appear to be shrinking. The performance firm thinks that could be due to a number of factors: that MySpace is continuing to recruit new users to replace those who may have left for Facebook, that people are using both social networks, or that Facebook is recruiting members who haven’t been prior users of either site.

MySpace about to lose out to Facebook in U.S.?

(Credit: Facebook)

Along with its nifty new iPhone application, Facebook on Monday night unveiled a new home page. No, not the moderately infamous “redesign” of its member pages–this is a new look for the page that you see when you navigate to Facebook.com without being logged in. It’s what you’ll see if you’re not yet a member.

There’s a pretty new blue gradient background, sure, and it makes the whole page look a little bit less stuffy. But more importantly, there’s a map of the world with little Facebook “head” icons scattered about the globe connected by hash mark lines.

The term “social utility,” one of founder Mark Zuckerberg’s preferred phrases, is gone from the home page, replaced by the more Zen-like description of the social network: “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.”

The map is significant. Facebook wants to be a global power, arguably in a way that not even Google is–look at the difficulty that Page, Brin, & co. have had dealing with regional rivals like China’s Baidu. At the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March, Zuckerberg talked about how young people in war-torn regions of the Middle East were using Facebook to communicate and broaden their horizons.

More than half of Facebook’s 100-million-plus users are outside the United States now, which means that the social network may be well on its way toward achieving global domination over its regional rivals.

On a more speculative note, the fact that this new, map-adorned home page was released in conjunction with a new iPhone application is interesting. The iPhone 3G is GPS-enabled, and some have speculated that real-time location sharing of some sort may be on the way for Facebook.

There are a handful of start-ups that already have location-aware services, and consumers have been reluctant to adopt them; Loopt, Whrrl, and Brightkite haven’t exploded the way some expected they would after they released iPhone 3G applications.

If Facebook made a move in the space, though, things could be different. Because, goodness knows, millions of Facebook users don’t seem to have any qualms about sharing everything else about themselves on the Web.

Read the original here:
Getting philosophical about Facebook’s new hub

On Monday, Microsoft updated two of its Live services: Windows Live Hotmail and Live Maps. Of the two, the changes to Hotmail are not yet available to everyone. The company began rolling it out to some of its users this weekend, with everyone else getting their hands on it in the next few weeks. It’s the newer, faster version of the service that brings in gains of up to 70 percent compared with older versions of Hotmail. (Read more about that here.)

Meanwhile, Live Search Maps, Microsoft’s online mapping tool has a really neat new way to get directions using local landmarks and local businesses. If the service picks up on one of these landmarks as part of your route, it will use it in addition to the street name. Oftentimes this comes in handy where a business has better signage than the city, which in the case of car dealerships and fast food restaurants is almost always true.

Click to enlarge

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Chris Pendleton, Microsoft Virtual Earth’s Tech Evangelist, says these landmarks are currently limited to these six categories:

• Gas Stations
• Major National Chains of Hotels
• Restaurants
• Convenience Stores
• Grocery Stores
• Car Dealerships

To help get you there, there’s a new multistop trip planner–a feature Google Maps has had since late 2006. This means you can add other addresses between the point A and point B of your trip, then print it out to stick in your car.

The service is also now instantly indexing community maps. Maps that users have created will now be able to be searched by everyone immediately. The user-created items will also be mixed in with business results, which means you or someone else could enter in a business’ address and phone number before it’s been officially added and have it show up in regular searches. Neat.

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Microsoft updates Live Hotmail and Maps

Facebook’s appointment of Ted Ullyot as its first general counsel might spook some in freewheeling Silicon Valley: he served as chief of staff to former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and as an associate counsel to President George W. Bush.

But in an interview Monday with CNET News, Ullyot said that his past resume will make it easier for the fast-growing social network to deal with Washington insiders–because he used to be one himself.

“Having served in the executive branch in Washington and also in the judicial branch, I have a pretty good understanding of those issues,” Ullyot said. “So to the extent that matters come up in those areas that have a legal component as distinct from a purely policy component, having a background in the federal government can help you understand the way government regulators think.”

Ullyot declined to provide specifics on his role at Facebook, which he starts in the middle of October, with the justification that he isn’t yet familiar enough with the company’s workings. Fair enough.

For example, he wouldn’t make a call on what would happen to any still-extant lawsuits against the ill-fated Beacon advertising program, or whether Facebook would take a stand against the U.S. House of Representatives’ rejection of Monday’s $700 billion Wall Street bailout. The general counsel at Microsoft, which has a $240 million stake in Facebook, has petitioned to the government to reconsider. “I’d just want to take a look at the issues,” Ullyot said.

“In my prior senses (as a general counsel), what I’ve really concluded in those is that every company is very different, unique, and has a particular sense of legal issues and challenges,” Ullyot explained. “And so the key for me, for any general counsel, is going to be to come on board, to study the issues, immerse yourself in the company, ask a lot of questions, and just get up to speed on the issues as fast as you can, so that’s what you look forward to doing.”

Ullyot said that Facebook had been looking to hire a general counsel for some time now, and that there was no particular reason that he was hired now as opposed to several months ago or down the road. In other words, Facebook didn’t hire a full-time lawyer to bail it out of anything–though Ullyot might find himself dealing with the film and publishing industries soon, if an allegedly unsavory book and movie about Facebook’s origins end up coming to fruition.

“Just getting to know it, (Facebook) is very mindful of Washington, very aware of Washington, and very savvy in the ways of Washington already,” said Ullyot, who will relocate to the company’s Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters but will spend time in D.C. as needed. “I think that comes from Elliot Schrage heading up policy, and having someone like Sheryl Sandberg as COO, with her extensive Washington background as a chief of staff herself at a Cabinet agency.”

So, not surprisingly, he thinks it’s been good for Facebook to have seasoned executives on board to help its young founding team navigate their way through the real world. But he added that Facebook’s existing legal team, which has been working with outside counsel, has done “an excellent job.”

He did say that his role at Facebook will probably also reach the thousands of third-party developers working on the social network’s developer platform; some of Facebook’s most recent legal issues, like the Scrabulous affair, have dealt with the platform rather than the site itself. “To the extent that we’ve got legal interactions with (developers), contractual or otherwise, or working on standards, I would expect that legal is involved in those,” Ullyot said.

There was one question he could answer concretely: Though Ullyot’s undergraduate years at Harvard overlapped with COO Sheryl Sandberg’s, he said that the two of them did not know each other.

Read the original here:
Facebook’s new general counsel coy about role

George Carlin said that when you live in the United States, you’re guaranteed a front row seat to the freak show. Events of the last few weeks only reconfirm how right he was.

(Credit: CNET News)

But first, think back a few years.

The deflating of the Internet bubble, which began in 2000, wasn’t a one-day blowup. Instead, the pain was spread over months and only ended after dozens of one-time high-flying technology companies got obliterated.

Out of the rubble emerged a new generation of startups that went on to operate under the Web 2.0 rubric. And since 2002, the innovation in consumer and social network services has been the more interesting story in tech.

But this latest market upset takes place at a very inconvenient time. (When is it not inconvenient?) It’s hard to know exactly, but most of these startups aren’t swimming in cash. Before it’s over, this may become a particularly hard transition for companies which depend on Internet advertising to pay the bills. Especially companies that operate according to the “freemium” model.

What’s “freemium?” Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures nicely defines how the model is supposed to work.

Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.

The idea is predicated on the assumption that you’ll be around long enough to collect. In normal times, that might work. Does anyone believe we’re living in normal times? Even if Bush convinces Congressional renegades in his party who opposed the Wall Street bailout, this economy’s getting worse by the week.

If past is prologue, the technology business may emerge changed, and ready for the next big challenge. But that’s the longer-term perspective. In the meantime, there’s that matter of meeting payroll. “Freemium” was a grand experiment but its practitioners don’t have the luxury of time any more.

More here:
Can the ‘freemium’ tech model weather the financial storm?