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Yeah, Facebook is on the selling block, supposedly. Mark Zuckerberg and the group of sophomores that built the site turned down an initial offer of $750 million, in the hopes of $2 billion (although I thought I read somewhere that Zuckerberg "never wanted to sell the company"). That's a huge success, considering it started two years ago. Facebook is now the seventh most-trafficked site on the Internet. The article I read said that Viacom would be a good candidate to buy the company — they own all the MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central networks. I guess that would be beneficial to Viacom so they could somehow know what the latest trends and stuff are, and I'm sure they could deliver better targeted advertising on the site (but hopefully not *more*). From a business point of view, Facebook is like the jackpot of marketing information about the youth in general. A company could make billions by simply parsing the information on the site — what students like, what they like to do, etc. — and deliver targeted advertising.

Awesome movie — one of two I saw over break (the other one was 16 Blocks, another good movie). I didn’t get that much sense of the “near future” that it tries to portray (although it does contain references to ‘America’s War’ and the Avian Flu), but everything else is really well done. Throughout various points in the movie, I kept feeling like it was trying to tell me something about where our society is heading and what the consequences were if we proceeded in the wrong direction. Of course it was somewhat obvious from the trailer and the tagline: “An uncompromising vision of the future”, but there were lots of references to things we have seen/currently see in our everyday lives. It definitely is a much more exaggerated environment — it takes place in a post-nuclear-war Britain, when a repressive government has taken power. I got a sense that it wasn’t trying to draw an analogy with any kind of government in the world today, but it definitely makes you think about some common stereotypes we have of history (who are the protagonists/antagonists?).

There are many movies out there that depict citizens struggling under a Nazi-like government, but this one starts you off in a state of complacency in the beginning — sure, everything is fake, but life isn’t hard… as the movie continues, you start to question the roles of characters and who is in the right/wrong. That itself makes it a powerful movie — in the end you realize the ideal that V stands for, and how a simple movie can change your way of thinking. Anyways, go see it. If nothing else, it was produced by the creators of the Matrix.

I’ve always been a fan of netvibes. I think it’s definitely, at the least, aesthetically better than the other ajax homepages out there (goowy, google, protopages, pageflakes, etc.). I’m starting to like live.com’s, not only because it looks nice, but also because of its extensibility with the Microsoft Gadgets… but netvibes is still the only one I use. They’ve been kinda slow with adding their modules though. Sometimes, they add some stupid modules like ‘Fox Sports Video’. Here’s a list of the ones I use:

- Gmail

- Todo list

- Weather

- digg, slashdot, penny-arcade RSS feeds

- POP-based email for my UNC account

- Webnote

- Box.net storage

The last is the newest module they have. Pretty sweet.. you can upload up to a gig of files and download it fairly quickly. The actual interface on Box.net is really nice but it’s not very intuitive; the problems I have with any kind of system like this (i.e. dropsend) is that it takes too long to download or upload a file in terms of the navigation you have to go through and the steps you have to take. The module on netvibes, however, is freakin sweet. It’s almost exactly what you’d want in terms of a web-based uploading service. The key is the simplicity, not in the user interface, but in the use case. You just want to upload, see it, and download it later on. That’s it. Sort of proves that sometimes a design can be simplified around an existing implementation.

For the past couple of years, Apple has been a major driving force in the computer industry, pushing out sleek, high-performance Powerbooks and the ubiquitous iPods (seriously, everyone has one now). Recently though, Apple has started to bore me. At first, the company stealthily released the iPod and after a few months and a few redesigns it exponentially rose in popularity. Soon, Steve Jobs started dropping mysterious one-liners in keynote speeches and Apple started hyping up special launch events. Sure, in the beginning it was pretty crazy. The iPod mini, iTunes, those crazy computer-in-a-monitor iMacs… it was ridiculous.

Then things started to get weird. We started to realize that there was a sort of similarity in every launch event — there wasn’t any real innovation being showcased; it was more of a tweaking of a certain product, or even just a small feature addition. It was almost as if while we were drooling over our new 5G Clickwheel iPods, Apple executives were snickering and watching movies on their iPods. At first I thought, okay, the iPod Video is cool, and the Nano is cool, and they just got Intel’s backing so we can expect some cool Macbooks. However, the latest launch event (and a few of them before it) have proved that Apple has been following the “Our Customers are Stupid” strategy, and now everyone’s caught on:

1. Apple unveils Mac Mini except with an INTEL CORE DUO!!

2. Apple unveils the “ipod Hi-Fi”, a gigantic black/white box that you stick your iPod into and it outputs music. God, that’s innovation.

3. Apple shows off their new 1GB Nano model, only $149! Just in case you thought 2GB was too much.

4. Apple recently added Showtime to their iTunes Music Store. Their three hit shows include Sleeper Cell, Weeds, and Fat Actress. Ever heard of em?

5. And finally: Apple is selling leather cases for their iPods for the amazing price of $99.

So now it should be pretty obvious, Apple is sucking the money out of our wallets in return for some boring products. Nevertheless, people will continue saying “whoa, that’s cool” at every launch event and Apple’s going to turn some good profits on their mysterious hype and marketing ploys. Oh well. I’m still looking for that new touchscreen, bluetooth-enabled video iPod. I bet Steve has had that for at least 3 years.

Lyceum is a hawt open-source, secure, scalable (up to 200,000 users!) blogsphere framework, just released by ibiblio. Basically, install your own blogger.com. It’s been in development for a while and gone through a myriad of developers, including myself, and now two of the most talented people I know — Fred Stutzman and John Joseph Bachir — have just put out a first release. So download it, get a group of friends together, install, and set up your own blogging community.