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Update (Facebook’s response):

In a warning message to users, Facebook has said it will soon be discontinuing Network Pages, through which members of a particular network can view and interact with a variety of data, such as Wall postings, marketplace listings, statistics on the most popular things in their network, and popular groups. In the same message, Facebook suggests the use of its Groups feature to connect with people around them.

Bringing popular posted items, groups, and marketplace listings together in one place is reason enough to keep the feature, but when you add in a lively discussion board and Wall posts that really help solve a lot of connection problems, I just don’t understand the reasoning behind this decision.

Facebook could not be immediately reached for comment.

“Facebook has decided to remove the Network Portals because we have found that most users tend to get network information from their feeds, such as News Feed and Mini-Feed, rather than navigating to the portals. Groups, Pages and users’ feeds continue to enable users to connect with the people in their networks and discover the most relevant information.”

Facebook plans to remove its Network Pages feature.

This post was updated at 6:42 PM PDT with comment from Facebook.

This is a pretty interesting move, and I’m not really sure why Facebook is going in this direction. Using Groups is a fine method of communication between people who share specific interests, but Network Pages, on the other hand, are great for seeing what’s popular in your network, which probably includes people with whom you would not otherwise be in a group. It is a good, consolidated view of things that are of direct concern and interest to people in that network.

I’m not saying all PC speakers suck, just that the smaller they get, the smaller they sound (M-Audio’s hefty Studiophile AV 40 ain’t bad). Hey, if your space is that cramped it might make more sense to use headphones rather than any speakers at all. Take Grado’s SR60 headphones, they sound worlds better than any micro-mini speaker I’ve heard.

One of the prime 1960s future fantasies involved the “food pill.” They predicted that in the future we would no longer need to eat food, we would just pop a pill that would provide perfectly balanced nutrition. The pills would supply the taste illusion of gourmet food, but without all the hassle of actually growing and preparing the food. Lucky for us the pills have yet to arrive, instead we got the Food Network, so millions of people can watch other people eat the yummiest food. Somehow the tiny pills turned into these awful little speakers.

Yes, they promise “studio quality” sound, but compared to any sort of decent bookshelf speaker, PC speakers sound like toys. They miniaturize not only sound, but also the music’s soul. So it means less.

Which one sounds better?

(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg)

All of the technology advances of the intervening decades can’t make a pint-size speaker sound like a hefty bookshelf or floorstanding model. Size definitely matters.

Except now that the future has arrived it’s kind of a letdown. Funny, back in the ’60s we never imagined the internet and Dick Tracy never used his wristphone to listen to the Beatles. Strangest of all, no one dreams about the future any more, I guess we’re done.

Sadly, 21st century audio technology has mostly been used to create ever cheaper and crappier audio–witness the boom of computer/PC and
iPod speakers–but they’re all laughably pitiful devices compared to what I was listening to 40 years ago. Yes, my long lost XAM brand speakers were comparatively gigantic but sounded awesome blasting Led Zeppelin and the Kinks. Music was so important we all wanted it to sound as good as possible; nowadays most buyers opt for the smallest possible speakers and/or cheapest possible price over sound quality. Good enough is a pretty low standard.

When I was a kid in the 1960s I was obsessed with the future. The space program was in all its glory, the moon landing was within our grasp, and that, combined with rock music being at its creative peak, what more could a teenage boy ask for? The future looked bright, science would soon feed the starving, cure all disease, and technology would bring prosperity to the entire world. Once those humdrum needs were satisfied we could get to the fun stuff and develop personal flying gear, teleportation machines, and start colonizing other worlds. For kids, at least nerdy kids of my generation, the future couldn’t happen fast enough.

Another major difference between the two is that you can set Mippin up to act as a mobile Web start page, with a select group of feeds you want to read, along with customizable content Widgets (a la iGoogle). Google Reader mobile offers no such feat, but does let you open up several articles at a time on the same page. Beaumont says the team is working on an upcoming developer platform to let people create widgets for the start page element of the site, and share them in a centralized directory–something that should be popping up in the future.

I’ve embedded the Pepsi challenge video below.

Earlier Tuesday, I spoke with Mippin co-Founder Scott Beaumont about this new version, along with what’s changed since I last looked at the product. Beaumont says that in 10 months Mippin has gone from covering 1,500 to 2,000 sites to tracking more than 92,000. From those, it’s accumulated 12 million articles that can be searched in Mippin’s story index.

One other thing that Beaumont is really excited about is how Mippin now handles the media found in blog posts. Besides pictures, audio and video regularly make their way into blog posts. Mippin would previously ignore this type of content. The new version will now convert Flash videos via a third-party service (in the background while you continue to browse), as well as natively play any audio files that have been embedded in posts. I gave it a spin on a non-YouTube video earlier–and while slow on EDGE it should be fairly nimble on the newer 3G handset or a hearty Wi-Fi connection.

The company has put together a comparison video of reading an RSS feed in Mippin compared with how long it takes to visit the normal page using gadget blog Engadget as a control. They’re calling it the Pepsi challenge, but I think a far fairer comparison would be to stack it up against Google Reader for the iPhone, which can accomplish a similar feat albeit without the back and forth buttons to skip articles.

This new version follows in the footsteps of older iterations, but has been tweaked to fit the screen a little better, as well as deliver an overall performance increase in page load times. The company has also laid the groundwork for an upcoming recommendation system (launching in just a few weeks) that will learn from and adapt to your daily reading habits to give you suggestions of blogs and stories you should be looking at. This new system is based not only on keywords and previous reading history, but what other users have been reading and subscribing to.

Mippin, a mobile feed reading service I looked at back in late 2007, has undergone a world of change in the last 10 months. On Tuesday night, the site is launching a new version aimed specifically at iPhone users–a growing segment of the market which will soon be even larger with the forthcoming release of the 3G model.

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When my posting frequency drops a bit, the usual reason is that I’m flying here and yon and otherwise occupied with goings-on at some conference, meeting, or client engagement. The situation in January was a bit different. For the first time in a while, I had some decent blocks of uncommitted time. And I put those to use fleshing out and writing some longer research notes that had been sitting on the to-do list for way too long.

Two of these deal with so-called “cloud computing”–the idea that software will increasingly run in the network. These were originally planned as a single paper, but for structural and length reasons, I decided to break out the definitional piece, “Defining Cloud Computing.” To tell the truth, I don’t typically find formal taxonomies and categorizations especially interesting, but I thought it useful in this case to be clear about the topic under discussion.

The main research note, “The Cloud vs. Open Source,” focuses on the relevancy of open source in a cloud computing world–and, especially, whether other types of protections and rights may not be more important than the right to view, modify, and redistribute source code. Tim O’Reilly has written and spoken on this topic.

At the just-concluded Sun Analyst Summit, I also had the opportunity to broach this topic with Simon Phipps, Sun’s Open Source Officer. An interesting perspective that he added is that we’re really talking about two different kinds of rights. One is essentially individual–the right for me to decide who can access what “data” that I “own” (whatever those terms mean exactly) and to transfer my data from one place to another. However, there’s also the idea of what I’ll call community or collective rights–the idea of reciprocal obligations associated with providing application programming interfaces and access.

One follow-up piece that I want to write when I have time will be something along the lines of “Why Not the Cloud?” in which I’ll look at some of the inhibitors to moving computing into the network.

Finally, “The Future of the Operating System” looks at how changes in the way that we operate computers and deploy applications is starting to change how we view the operating system, a technology construct that, in important ways, hasn’t really changed for decades. Server virtualization is the big driving force behind change here. However, virtualization is hardly unrelated to cloud computing–both through services like Amazon EC2 and, more conceptually, in the fact that virtualization is all about masking lower-level details from users.

These three Illuminata research notes are all available as free samples.

Is Facebook the next Google? Maybe and maybe not, but either way there’s a lot that Facebook can learn from Google and from the Googlers it’s hiring.

The latest person to move offices from Mountain View, Calif., to Facebook, seven miles away in Palo Alto is Sheryl Sandberg. The Google vice president of global sales and operations will become chief operating officer at the social network company later this month.

Sheryl Sandberg

(Credit:
Google)

Facebook previously hired Benjamin Ling, who was in charge of Google Checkout; Justin Rosenstein, a developer on GDrive and product manager for Google Page Creator; and Gideon Yu, former YouTube chief financial officer who left shortly after Google acquired YouTube in 2006.

Sandberg helped turn online ads into a cash cow for Google and handled sales operations while the company’s employees and revenue grew by leaps and bounds. She and the other ex-Googlers understand the Internet and how to turn ads into cash better than anyone else. Sandberg is more than qualified for the job at Facebook, whose 500-person business is miniscule compared with Google’s 16,000 operation.

Sandberg also will help Facebook avoid another privacy fiasco such as the storm caused by its Beacon ad-tracking technology. My colleague, Caroline McCarthy caught up with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who insisted that Sandberg isn’t a pure replacement for outgoing executive Owen Van Natta.

For Googlers, Facebook offers an opportunity to be a big fish in a small pond and join a start-up with a popular consumer Internet site, focused on innovative technology and run by a daring young Ivy Leaguer.

“Facebook is maturing, and they’re trying to figure out how to be a revenue-generating company…the social networking part was easy; the business part isn’t necessarily,” said Tim Hanlon, an executive vice president at Denuo, a consulting arm of advertising agency Publicis Groupe.

The hiring of Googlers at Facebook “is more an indication that Google is becoming a big company that is probably not providing the entrepreneurial opportunities that people thought they were getting when they originally signed up,” he said. Indeed, my new editor, Dan Farber, calls the move one of Zuckerberg’s smartest so far.

Googlers are likely getting frustrated by the sheer size of the company now, said Satya Patel, a former product manager for ads at Google who now runs the digital media investing efforts at Battery Ventures.

“The people at Google have seen this movie before and know what it takes to solve some of the problems that Facebook is dealing with on a daily basis,” he said. “They see Facebook as an opportunity to be part of a small organization and have that same impact again” that they had in the early days at Google.

Patel sees such migrations of workers in Silicon Valley as a natural evolution. “People are going from the successes of the prior decade to the successes of the coming decade,” he said.

Rosenstein declined to be interviewed, but his words when he left Google for Facebook in June 2007 say a lot:

“Facebook really is That company. Which company? That one. That company that shows up once in a very long while–the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago. That company where large numbers of stunningly brilliant people congregate and feed off each other’s genius. That company that’s doing with 60 engineers what teams of 600 can’t pull off. That company that’s on the cusp of Changing The World, that’s still small enough where each employee has a huge impact on the organization…That company where everyone seems to be having the time of their life.”

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It’s probably not a wholly accurate description, but to call Mix ‘08 the conference for “the new Microsoft” doesn’t seem that far off. Perhaps even more apt would be to think of it as the show for Microsoft as it aspires to be. Other possibilities? Well, if one were cynical, maybe “the conference for Microsoft as it wishes others to see it.” Or if one were sympathetic to the travails of companies with large, and fundamentally conservative, installed bases how about this for a tag line: “If only change were easy as giving a slick conference.”

Yet, for all that, having attended numerous Microsoft events over the years, the gestalt of this one was palpably different. One would never mistake Mix ‘08, held in Las Vegas earlier this month, for a Tech-Ed, much less a WinHEC. It’s not just a case of different session tracks or appropriate obeisance to the rise of network-based computing in a Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie keynote, though those were certainly present. Rather it was an infusion of different attitudes and behaviors–and software releases that offered evidence of at least nascent change.

Silverlight, Microsoft’s Rich Internet Application (RIA) framework, makes a good study point. Silverlight is most notably a competitor to the Adobe Integrated Runtime (aka AIR, nee Apollo). It’s essentially an approach to using the horsepower of a “thick client” PC to allow applications being delivered over the network be as responsive and immersive as they would be with a typical client app.

I bring up Silverlight for a couple of reasons. The first is that Mix ‘08 saw the release of Silverlight 2 beta 1, which is really the first full release of Silverlight. (Ray Ozzie referred to it as “delivering on Silverlight’s potential.”) Whereas Silverlight 1 was narrowly focused on media, Silverlight 2 is a subset of the full desktop Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) UI framework, and also adds networking and local storage options.

In any case, Silverlight was clearly one of the stars of the conference. (There’s a lot of information and some very cool demos in the conference sessions–videos of which are all posted online.) I took the opportunity to sit down with Brad Becker, Microsoft’s Group Product Manager for the UX (User Experience) & Tools Marketing Group to discuss a it in a bit more depth. We talked about how HTML and JavaScript are being forced to fill roles they were never intended to fill at the same time that user richness and usability expectations are growing. About how Flash was originally “designed to bring Mickey Mouse to the Web”–not interactive, high-resolution media. About the blurring lines between design and development (another interesting thread but out-of-scope here).

And then Brad pulled out a MacBook (running OS X). “Cross platform is a reflection of reality,” he explained. A calculated stunt? Hardly. I won’t say that
Mac’s were commonplace among the Microsoft employees at the event. But they were hardly rare (although a few of the big Apple logos that dominate a MacBook’s lid were papered over with Silverlight stickers.)

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say that you wouldn’t have seen Microsoft employees, including execs, casually carrying around Macs at a conference a few years back. Winds of change are welling up. However faintly.

Does this mean that Microsoft is agnostic about whether developers develop to Windows and .NET? Of course not. But it’s worth noting this week I’m in Salt Lake City at Novell’s Brainshare user conference. (Yes, it has been a busy month.) Novell execs such as CTO Jeff Jaffe make no bones about their preference for a J2EE on Linux software stack. Yet, Novell remains a major force behind the Mono Project that allows .NET applications to run on Linux and other non-Windows operating environments. And Novell is doing the Linux port of Silverlight (”Moonlight”).

In other words, in this day and age, expressing interest–even a strong one–for a given development stack increasingly doesn’t translate into prohibiting any sort of interoperability or compatibility with the “enemy.” The on-the-ground reality is naturally much messier than executive-level shows of mutual love and respect, but it’s still a qualitatively different reality from the old days when walled gardens had high walls indeed.

On Tuesday, Apple issued a security update for iPhoto. The update is for users of
Mac OS X v10.4.9 or later running iPhoto ‘08 (part of iLife 08). It addresses the vulnerability detailed in CVE-2008-0043.

To be vulnerable, Apple says, a user must subscribe to a maliciously crafted photocast. A remote attacker may then execute arbitrary code on the compromised machine. The fix addresses how iPhoto handles format strings when processing photocast subscriptions.

Apple credits Nathan McFeters of Ernst & Young’s Advanced Security Center for reporting this vulnerability.

iPhone-style devices with Nvdia’s APX 2500 system-on-a-chip–due late this year and next year–incorporate most of the functionality of a PC. (See block diagram.) And it is important to note that Nvidia is building all of the core electronics that will run a mobile internet device, not just the graphics component.

The APX 2500 is different from Intel’s Atom processor platform–which is offered as a processor and a separate chipset–because the 2500 integrates everything onto one piece of silicon. This makes it more akin to Intel’s upcoming Moorestown processor that’s due next year or early 2010.

(Credit:
Nvidia)

Nvidia APX 2500-based Windows Mobile device has flick-and-roll interface

Nvidia APX 2500 block diagram

Nvidia’s goal is to pack as much processing punch as possible into a few-hundred-milliwatt power envelope, said Michael Rayfield, general manager of the Mobile Business Unit. “I said start from zero. And then made my team beg and plead for every milliwatt,” he said. Notebook PC processors typically operate in power envelopes between 10 and 35 watts.

The platform that Nvidia is demonstrating goes far beyond the staid, pin-striped Windows Mobile that is used today. Nvidia is showing finger-flick-and-roll screens and accelerometer-based reorienting 720p video.

(Credit:
Nvidia)

CNET Video of APX 2500 prototype here.

All on, believe it or not, Windows Mobile. The operating system has struggled since its inception back in 2000. Initially, it had promise on Compaq (and later Hewlett-Packard) iPaq handhelds, but these devices never appealed to a large base, even in corporate America which eventually went en masse for the Blackberry. There is more acceptance now as Windows Mobile 6.1 is adopted by companies like HTC, Samsung, and Acer (which announced its intention to bring out a Windows smartphone)–but it is still Windows. In a post-iPhone world, Nvidia says this is not adequate.

Watch out, Nvidia is stalking the
iPhone. The maker of fast graphics processors will apply its chip know-how to juice up the mobile internet device market and the Windows Mobile interface.

Nvidia APX 2500-based Windows Mobile device interface

The prototype mobile internet device that Nvidia is currently working on is not the product that will appear from phone companies or navigation device vendors. Rayfield said it is necessarily a thick device and contains extra circuit boards because it is a development platform. The final product made by device manufacturers will be thin, he said.

(Credit:
Nvidia)

But to the user, the biggest difference will be Microsoft’s Mobile Windows interface and what can happen when there is Nvidia GeForce graphics silicon pushing everything around.

These tiny devices are designed to run 720p HDTV video for 10 hours–one of the marquee features that Nvidia will be emphasizing, Rayfield said. He plugged a prototype APX 2500-based device into a large screen TV via a High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) connector and played high-definition movies with the same fluidity and resolution as you get from a big HDTV box or bigger computer.

As reported back in February, after a decade of pumping up PC performance, Nvidia is betting a big part of its future on boosting graphics performance in fit-in-your-pocket mobile internet devices (MIDs).

The biggest problem Motorola has been facing is a lack of compelling and popular handsets, especially in Europe. The company hasn’t had a hit phone since the Razr. Amid the turmoil, the company announced last month that it is considering “strategic options” to get the company back on the right track, which could include selling its handset business. Still, top executives are adamant that the company does not want to sell the handset business, and it’s looking for other alternatives.

Motorola has been shaking up its top management as it struggles to get its fledgling handset business back on track. The company has seen its market share in the handset market fall dramatically over the past year. The company fell from second place to third in terms of handset shipments during 2007. Meanwhile, market leader Nokia has grown market share to about 40 percent.

Liska has experience helping get value out of businesses. While working in private equity, his task was to go in and help run companies, which were typically underperforming. And before working for private equity firms, Liska had been at Sears, where he ran its credit business. While there, he helped Sears sell the division to Citigroup in 2003 for $6 billion.

Brown became CEO in January after former CEO Ed Zander was forced to step down amid pressure from investors due to the company’s worsening financial situation.

Liska, who had been a partner for private equity firms including MidOcean Partners, CVC Capital Holdings and Ripplewood Holdings, will take the top finance spot at the company starting March 1. He will replace acting CFO Tom Meredith, and he’ll report directly to Chief Executive Officer Greg Brown.

Mobile phone maker Motorola has named Paul Liska, a former private equity executive, as chief financial officer, the company said late Thursday.

The noise is reduced because multiple subarrays capture the same views. It’s therefore easier to distinguish true color of the subject from off-color noise. In addition, each subarray can be set to record a specific color, which could reduce the “color crosstalk” of current image sensors, he said. Today’s “Bayer” pattern sensors employ a checkerboard of red, green, and blue pixel sensors, but bright red light captured by a red pixel can, for example, leak out a bit and affect the neighboring blue and green pixels.

(Credit:
Keith Fife/Stanford University)

Other advantages
Depth isn’t the only potential advantage of the multi-aperture approach, Fife said. It could also help reduce noise, which in digital photography takes the form of colored speckles that are a particular plague when shooting at higher ISO sensitivity settings.

So those are the downsides, but that’s par for the course with new technology. And even if the technology never materializes, it’s a strong indicator of the radical transformations that are in store for digital photography.

The result is a photo accompanied by a “depth map” that not only describes each pixel’s red, blue, and green light components but also how far away the pixel is. Right now, the Stanford researchers have no specific file format for the data, but the depth information can be attached to a JPEG as accompanying metadata, Fife said.

Each subarray gets its own microlens. Although that complicates the manufacturing of the sensor, it could simplify the lenses used in existing cameras, Fife said. And lens manufacturing today certainly has no shortage of difficulties with a variety of exotic glass and even fluorite crystal elements, aspherical elements, and other avant-garde optics.

• 3D images are possible only with subjects that have texture and other detail. “If a picture is captured of a perfectly smooth white wall, it is impossible to estimate the distance to that wall,” Fife said.

(Credit:
Keith Fife/Stanford University)

After a photo is taken, image-processing software then analyzes the slight location differences for the same element appearing in different patches–for example, where a spot on a subject’s shirt is relative to the wallpaper behind it. These differences from one subarray to the next can be used to deduce the distance of the shirt and the wall.

Either way, you’d best start thinking about the implications because Fife isn’t the only one working on the challenge. Image-editing powerhouse Adobe Systems has shown off some 3D camera technology too. It should be noted, of course, that stereoscopy itself is an old and respected photographic subject.

To accomplish the feat, Keith Fife and his colleagues have developed technology called a multi-aperture image sensor that sees things differently than the light detectors used in ordinary digital cameras.

(Credit:
Keith Fife/Stanford University)

Most folks think of a photo as a two-dimensional representation of a scene. Stanford University researchers, however, have created an image sensor that also can judge the distance of subjects within a snapshot.

• Processing the image, both to figure out how to merge the subimages into one overall image and to create the depth map, takes about 10 times as much processing horsepower as conventional on-chip image processing. Cameras already are battery hogs, and nobody wants to draw any more power or slow down camera performance.

“In addition to the two-dimensional image, we can simultaneously capture depth info from the scene,” Fife said when describing the technology in a talk at the International Solid State Circuits Conference earlier this month in San Francisco.

Instead of devoting the entire sensor for one big representation of the image, Fife’s 3-megapixel sensor prototype breaks the scene up into many small, slightly overlapping 16×16-pixel patches called subarrays. Each subarray has its own lens to view the world–thus the term multi-aperture.

This photo shows the prototype chip with 12,616 subarrays. Each pixel on the chip is 0.7 microns on edge, and the chip consumes 10.45 milliwatts of power.

“There is opportunity for most of the complexity of the lens design to sit at the semiconductor rather than at the objective lens,” Fife said. “Although the local optics (on the sensor) may be challenging, it is possible that the optics can be better controlled with lithography and semiconductor processes than with the injection molding and grinding that is used in the conventional camera lenses.”

The microlenses might even be all that’s needed for some applications, such as taking super-closeup “in vivo” photos inside plant and animal subjects where there’s no room for a camera, Fife said. “The multiaperture sensor can form images at close proximity…because no objective lens is needed,” Fife said.

Each subarray on the multi-aperture sensor captures a small portion of the overall image, a portion that overlaps slightly with that of the neighboring subarrays. By comparing the differences, a camera can judge the distance of elements in the subject. (Note that this mock-up differs from reality, in which each subimage would be rotated 180 degrees, but this makes the idea easier to grasp.)

Even if you don’t want to print holographic pictures of your new kitten, I suspect that 3D technology could help with some traditional photography challenges. Just as face detection can make a camera decide better where to focus and how to expose a shot, having a depth map could make this sort of calculation that much more sophisticated.

• Because the same subject matter is captured redundantly by multiple pixels, the ultimate sensor resolution is lower than the raw number on the overall sensor.

This diagram shows the multi-aperture sensor, which puts a small lens over a group of image sensor pixels. Each subarray gets its own microlens.

No free lunch
Lest you get carried away by the technology, you should be aware of a number of caveats:

Recording photos in three dimensions is a pretty radical overhaul of the concept. Depending on your preferences, it could be anything from an exciting new frontier to the latest annoying digital gimmick.