But I dont think more iPods and iPhones is the long-term legacy of Steve Jobs. Its much bigger. The greatest legacy of Steve Jobs is that he gave permission to everyone else to be a poet of computers, to be a businessman in blue jeans, to be a constructive misfit, a technological artist, a corporate renegade, to think different, and to remember the soul of the machine.  Because of him we all have now learned to demand that technology reveal its beauty.

via The Soul of Apple by Kevin Kelly.

500 million and rising also makes it clear to anyone not paying attention that Facebook is no fad and that it is a cultural force shaping our collective culture. Even if you have no desire to ever set up a profile, you can’t ignore it and you are now oddly defined in the negative and left out of the zeitgeist.

A service of that size won’t disappear anytime soon, even if Facebook has hit its plateau in the U.S. But net users are fickle and the web’s short history includes dozens of sites that were once high-flying that have either since died (Geocities), lost their luster (Yahoo) or faded into irrelevance (Friendster).

So how could Facebook lose its place at the center of the web?

If you search for flights on Google today, all you get is links to results from the big online travel sites. Bing, on the other hand, offers a much richer Travel experience, complete with comparison prices for the same flight from the different travel engines, as well as predictive charts and graphs from Farecast which was acquired by Microsoft for $115 million in 2008. Bing also gets a lot of its flight and fare data from ITA.

via Google Pays $700 Million In Cash For Flight Info Provider ITA.

via YouTube – Introducing Google TV.

Development on the product is most definitely full steam ahead. Is your TV screen the next battleground in the platform wars? Survey says: hell yes.

via The next Apple TV revealed: cloud storage and iPhone OS on tap… and a $99 price tag — Engadget.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the good, old-fashioned copy machine. But, as Armen Keteyian reports, advanced technology has opened a dangerous hole in data security.

Facebook had a master password that allowed employees to access any account and still records far more information about how you use the site than you’d assume, according to a new interview with a Facebook insider.

American blog, The Rumpus, has published an interview with someone it claims is a current Facebook employee. The biggest revelations: there was once a master password that would access any profile and Facebook records which profiles you visit most (essentially a stalking count) amongst many other bits of data.

The alleged employee says a master password once allowed Facebook employees to access any account. The password was apparently a variation on ‘Chuck Norris’ and was used for engineering purposes but other employees were aware of it. Most interestingly, the interviewee claims that misuse of the password led to two Facebook employees being fired.

Though the master password is apparently no longer in use, the interviewee claims that employees can simply query Facebook’s back-end database to look at private information. They also claim that there is a specilaised tool to access specific profiles but that Facebook requires a reason to use it and employees can be sacked for misusing it.

The interview also claims the social network records every element of your activity on the site. That goes beyond messages you write and receive to how many times you click on a particular profile, which photos you view, who has tagged you most in photos and notes. The information is apparently behind a recent change that now shows your best friends first in a search rather than simply an alphabetical list.

Facebook gave a statement to Techcrunch pouring scorn on the interview: “This piece contains the kind of inaccuracies and misinterpretations you would expect from something sourced ‘anonymously’ and we’ll leave it at that.”

However, it’s clear that Facebook is able to access profile information when it needs to, for instance to help police with their investigations, so the existence of a master password or tool for accessing private information is not so far fetched.

Does this interview suggest that one employee has simply misinterpreted Mark Zuckerberg’s call for a less private, more open world? We suspect he didn’t mean spilling all of Facebook’s secrets, whatever he’s done with his own profile.

Out now | £free | Facebook (via The Rumpus/Techcrunch)

Posted on Alltop by Annie Colbert.

What the heck is Google Wave? You and about 64.7 percent of the Twittersphere are all wondering (scientific calculation based on random checks of trending topics.) EpipheoStudios.com created a handy animated video to help explain the Wave hype with an underlying motive of scoring an elusive invite to the fancy new Google product. Does anyone else feel like this whole invite situation is reminiscent of elementary school birthday party invites? Still not a cool kid, I suppose.

Hunter Walk, director of product management at YouTube:

Q: How does YouTube see the online video world shaping up and what does it want its role within it to be?

The future of online video is that there is no such thing as online video, there’s just video. Consumers are going to be accessing the content that interests them through a number of devices and what’s really going to be at the center of that equation is that user, not any particular channel or device. It’s the “channel of you.”

We think the content you care about is really three types of content: mass/popular media, the stuff that everyone wants to watch, that everyone wants to talk about … and more niche media that might relate to topics you care about, places you’ve been, people you know. But then there’s also very personal media, the content created by you and your friends, the documenting of you and their lives.

Before that has never been brought to one platform together. Consumers have stapled that together, they’ve created the channel of you through multiple devices and multiple subscription packages, spending their time on lots of different information gathering. YouTube is the first place that really brings that all together.

Q: But is YouTube still coming up short on the mass market media, when you can’t get full episodes of current TV shows like 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live, whereas you can on Hulu.com or by simply turning on your television?

A: No one channel has the totality of all the content that’s ever been created, but I think what you see is, content is quickly rushing to these platforms that offer consumers choice.

I look at where we were (just after Google acquired the company), versus two and a half years later and the tremendous amount of that mass media that’s been filled in. In January 2007 you were still talking primarily about music, which is still a place where we have an incredible corpus. But since then, having added some long form television in the sense of classic TV or syndication TV, short form content from partners like CBS, ESPN, yesterday’s sports highlights, NBA, BBC.

I think it continues to accelerate and my big bet is this content will continue to migrate to YouTube. But because the channel of you is so powerful that consumer will increasingly make consumption decisions based upon the content that is easily accessible to them and consumable by them on their terms.

Q: Could the rapid rise in popularity of Hulu make it harder to get full episodes and other professional content onto YouTube, and the ads that come with them?

A: I think the existence and growth of a site like Hulu has helped companies to decide to commit to online strategies and very often these strategies include YouTube and that is very productive for us.

Hulu is focused on one very particular niche of official content, and it’s broadcast television that happens to be on air right now and it’s largely content provided by its three majority owners. There’s an incredible amount of content that goes beyond that definition and when you look at where that content is aggregating, YouTube is the place.

We’re not a media company, but what I do think is we’re a media catalyst. We use our platform, we use our technology, we use our monetization tools to accelerate the creation of media and the distribution of media. That’s a vision and a mission that’s very much in line with Google’s broader strategy, which is about information and access to information.

Q: One analyst I spoke to made the point that, while it’s all well and good that YouTube may be getting closer to profitability, it’s still been three years after a nearly $2 billion acquisition and who knows how much additional money since. By this point they should be contributing a lot more on the revenue side to Google. What’s your take on that concern?

A: From just about any objective metric if you look at YouTube’s business, you’d be happy. The revenue growth over the last few years; the growth to the second largest search engine … the impact that YouTube’s been able to have on news and politics in the world.

We increasingly have generations of consumers who are looking at YouTube as the new TV, this is what’s bringing them a visual on the world around them. Time spent on YouTube is incredibly high, I think it’s almost 150 minutes per user a month and only growing.

I don’t think there’s a way to look at YouTube and be anything but bullish, whether you’re looking at our business, whether you’re looking at the general trends of how people are interacting with video online and via technology, and then when you look at the actual performance metrics of the site.

Tom Pickett, director of online sales and operations, began the conversation by talking about efforts to make money at YouTube:

A: We are on a great positive trajectory with respect to revenue growth and we’ve done a lot of work to streamline our operations on the cost side. We’ve seen tremendous success with selling (ads on) the home page, particularly in the U.S. market and we’re starting to get traction with that internationally as well, which represents a big opportunity. More recently (we launched) in-stream advertising (that plays before, during or after the video) on what we call our watch pages. That, I think, is going to be a big opportunity ahead of us as we monetize more and more of the video content that we have on YouTube.

We focused on a lot in the past on big brand advertisers and we’re trying to move much more into a broader offering across the whole long tail of advertisers as well.

The way we think about content on YouTube is we want to be the place for all kinds of content, from premium content you might find on TV, to mid-sized content producers who are producing content directly for the web to users who have been able to generate an audience over time on YouTube. All of that content is very attractive to users and we also think very attractive to advertisers. It’s going to be a very effective way for advertisers to reach their audience in the future.

Q: What are the broader goals and long-term opportunities of YouTube?

A: The more our partners make, the more we make. And the more content we have on YouTube creates more users coming to YouTube … In the end, we’re really about expanding the pie and we want to share that with our partners.

The home page has gotten us to a great start in getting traction with advertisers and now we’re expanding on that, really going much deeper, with using the video content we have as an advertising mechanism.

We do have a viable business here. There have been a lot of doubts about that in the press and what we’re saying is that we see ourselves on a really nice trajectory.

Our goal is not just to be a profitable company. Our goal is to be a huge economic force for our partners and for our advertisers — and in the end, that will benefit our users.