For many tech startups, it can be difficult to compete with large companies like Google, Microsoft, and others for young talent coming out of universities. Not only is the recruiting process very expensive for small bootstrapped startups, but posting listings in Craigslist, Monster or other job boards can be lacking in an interpersonal connection for both students and employers.

Jobnob, an online job board for alternative compensation jobs, is hoping to change this by launching a “virtual job fair,” called Ivy Plus Job Fair, to allow startups to compete for students’ attention at several of the best colleges in the U.S. Using webcams and video, students can log-on to the job fair to hear twenty startups pitch job opportunities at their companies. Interested students can enter virtual break out rooms for each company to ask questions and submit resumes and startups can hold office hours where reps will be available online to talk with students.

Jobnob, which is partnering with ten universities in the U.S. (Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Duke, University of Chicago, University of Illinois, and NYU), is holding two job fairs, one for liberal arts students and one for computer science and engineering students.

For startups, placement in the job fair costs between $500 and $3,000. This pricing is far less than the cost of on-campus recruiting, which Jobnob says costs on average $30,000 for companies.

The events take place in November (the deadline for companies to sign up is Oct 15.) You can find more information here.

As we saw from TechCrunch Disrupt’s GameCrush, gaming and online dating can surprisingly find a middle ground. Another stealthy startup, called TheIceBreak, also wants to help people meet each other using gaming elements, but adds a slightly different twist.

Co-founded by YouTube’s first UI Designer, Christina Brodbeck; and former head of YouTube Mobile Dwipal Desai; TheIceBreak is both a web and mobile game with the purpose of creating and bettering your relationships. Although Desai and Brodbeck are reluctant to give out details of the soon to be launched service, TheIceBreak is designed to stay with users through all stages of their relationships, whether they are single or not.

Brodbeck (who is actually an angel investor in GameCrush) says that TheIceBreak will fill a gap that is taking place in the online dating space, which is fraught with high membership churn and low return engagement. The startup, which will take certain features from Brodbeck’s previous dating site Pickv, will focus on helping users find a partner and help better the relationship once you find that partner. The site is expected to launch before the ends of the year.

Without set details, it’s hard to tell if TheIceBreak, which is self-funded, will be able to gain traction in the online dating space, which is dominated by Match.com, eHarmony and other larger sites. Being that Brodbeck and Desai both have significant experience in online video; it would be interesting if the site could incorporate video into the platform in order to “break the ice.”

Advocates for environmentally sustainable business are having a rough week. Two products beloved by the movement, the Tesla Motors Roadster, an all-electric vehicle, and PepsiCo Frito-Lay’s SunChips, the snacks sold in biodegradable bags, are suffering setbacks.

Tesla voluntarily recalled Roadster models 2.0 and 2.5 when the company heard from a customer with this problem:

[A] low voltage auxiliary cable in [the] vehicle chafed against the edge of a carbon fiber panel in the vehicle causing a short, smoke and possible fire behind the right front headlamp of the vehicle. This issue [involved the] 12V low voltage auxiliary cable and… not the main battery pack or main power system.

Tesla’s stock price, which remained steady immediately after the Oct. 1st recall, dipped more than 3% within the week as media and industry analysts discussed the Tesla Roadsters’ fire risk along with the company’s looming expenses and competitive outlook.

Tesla’s chief executive Elon Musk will soon have to cut checks for: recruiters to bring in hundreds of new engineers and their salaries; continued work on a new, Model S sedan; and production of new vehicles along with fixes for the recalled Roadsters, which numbered fewer than 500 vehicles.

Skeptics worry about how long it will take Tesla to generate more money than it spends on all of this in the name of the environmentally sound but still sweet ride.

Challenges to Tesla in the market are also varied, including other electric vehicles like the Nissan Leaf, and hybrids like the Porsche Cayenne S Hybrid.

Shortly after the smokey Roadster recall, PepsiCo Frito-Lay announced it would scale back the use of plant-based, biodegradable plastic packaging for SunChips due to complaints about the bags making noise.

All but one of the flavors of SunChips will now be sold in “traditional” plastic sacks instead of the non-petroleum, compostable stuff. That’s at least until the company comes up with or purchases another green alternative.

Back in April 2009, when Sun Chips introduced the biodegradable bags, the company ran extensive print, TV and digital advertising touting the green initiative (as MediaPost reported then). Now, PepsiCo Frito-Lay seems to blame the bags’ noise for the widely reported 11% sales decline in SunChips over the last 52 weeks.

Alexis Madrigal, a writer for The Atlantic went so far as to lament how much capital, human and otherwise, was invested in the SunChips sustainable packaging effort in the first place:

This is where we put our productive talents to work…The great machinery induced by billion dollar markets for everything (anything) can be reconfigured for any purpose, even something as mind numbing as flexible, lightweight chip containers.

Typical “flexible, lightweight chip container” materials — namely petroleum-based plastics — represent some 8% of the nation’s waste stream according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Other writers suggested that consumers should have tolerated the noise or poured their chips in a bowl if the idea of keeping petroleum-based (and quieter) plastics out of the waste stream mattered to them, really.

Will PepsiCo’s investors feel good about the company ditching the sad sacks in response to customers’ demands, or will they be inspired by the fact that PepsiCo Frito-Lay tried to actually do something game changing in the first place? Its stock price was dipping at the opening of the market on Friday Oct. 7th following widespread media discussion about the bags. PepsiCo is, unlike Tesla Motors, such a massive global food and beverage business there’s a chance that SunChips’ sales didn’t even move the needle for investors.

Environmentalists will be watching both brands, hoping for improved sales and stock prices, and case studies that prove sustainable business can also be profitable and competitive, and these setbacks were just a price paid by pioneers.

Earlier this week, Facebook was granted a broad patent on mobile location-based social networks. It seems to cover everything from members of a social network sharing their location with each other through their mobile phones to manual checkins. In other words, it sounds like Facebook just patented Foursquare’s main product.

The application was submitted in February, 2007, well before Foursquare was even founded. But it forgot to mention one thing. In the long list of more than 50 other previous patents it cites as prior art, it never mentions perhaps the most obvious patent of all: The Dodgeball patent. The Dodgeball patent lists as its inventors Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert , the co-founders of Dodgeball, an early mobile social network acquired by Google in 2005 and shut down in 2007. Crowley, of course, went on to found Foursquare, where he is currently the CEO (Rainert also now works at Foursquare as chief product officer).

I am not a patent lawyer, but these two patents sound extremely similar. The actual title of the Dodgeball patent is “Location-based social software for mobile devices.” It describes a method to connect friends and acquaintances through mobile devices by sending each other their locations using GPS. Here is the summary of the patent:

A method of establishing connection between users of mobile devices includes receiving at a computer a location of a first user from a first mobile device, receiving from a second mobile device a location of a second user having an acquaintance relationship to the first user, and sending a message to the first mobile device based on the proximity of the first user to the second user.

Compare that to this part of Facebook’s patent, which seems to cover the similar concept of a checkin:

the status information manually provided by the first user on an input module of the mobile device; associating the location information with the status information of the first user in a database; and sending the status information and the location information of the first user to a second user for display.

Part of the Facebook patent describes other use cases as well, such as simply showing where friends are who have checked in nearby, but that is also part of the Dodgeball patent, which includes “a message generator to prepare messages to users regarding the locations of their acquaintances if those locations are proximate to the users.” At the very least, it is a little too convenient that the Dodegball patent was not listed as prior art. Did the (probably overworked) patent examiner even consider the Dodgeball patent before he granted Facebook its patent?

OpenID software creator JanRain is launching a new iPhone SDK today, called JanRain Engage, which allows an app developer’s visitors to sign-in to the app with their existing accounts on Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo, LinkedIn or other networks and then publish their comments, purchases, reviews or other activities from the app to multiple social networks.

The social networking product, which is available through an SDK, allows developers to choose from a list of up to 12 login providers and specify the order in which they appear via the Janrain Engage dashboard. Janrain Engage will also remembers an app user’s preferred network on return visits and will provide a single-click return experience. And Janrain Engage allows a developer’s iPhone application to authenticate users through iPhone's native UI.

For app developers, the benefits of integrating a comprehensive social network login product helps create between 6 to 25 new referral visits for each social action a user shares with friends. JanRain also offers an OpenID iPhone technology, which launched earlier this year. The company raised $3.25 million in Series A funding last year.

One thing that’s really missing at this year’s CEATEC 2010 exhibition is robots, at least from the bigger companies. One exception is Fujitsu whose so-called “Social Robots” may not look like much from the outside but are actually quite sophisticated. Even though the teddy bear robots sounded pretty creepy (they keep making weird noises, which you can hear in the video embedded below), I was brave enough for a hands-on test.

Read more…

eLEGS is a unique exoskeleton for general consumers designed to allow wheelchair-bound folks to walk. The product, based on some early work at the Berkeley Robotics and Human Engineering lab. In this video, a nearly paralyzed young woman walks again after 18 years.

The company, BerkeleyBionics, is holding a press conference today at 10:30am PST to reveal some new products. However, I think the video says it all, however. To quote Paul Simon, this is the age of miracles and wonder. It’s quite hard to be cynical about this technology when it can do so much for so many.

Read more…

We think the person/social media strategist behind Bajillionhits.biz might have a slight crush on us, or at least our boss. In any case the second, “How Do You Pitch To An Angel” episode in Alex Blagg’s Statocast series is some pretty hilarious stuff. Key takeaway: “I understand the code, I’m Twitter friends with Michael Arrington.” Also: “Give me your seed!”

And in case you are wondering (like I was until about the fifth time I watched this), the word “strat” in this context means “strategy.”

After a 15-minute private demo of Cisco’s Umi, the company’s latest video calling system, I was fairly impressed with the unit’s sharp 1080p HD resolution and the natural feel of the audio (which is apparently designed to elevate human voices and suppress background noise). Then again, that level of quality is no real surprise given Cisco’s history in telepresence technology and their popularity on the enterprise side.

However, the main problem with Cisco is not innovation, it’s getting outside of the boardroom and finding a real place in the consumer’s living room— and no where is that gap more apparent than in Umi’s sticker price. As CrunchGear reporter Devin Coldewey lamented, it’s a consumer-facing device priced for the office at $599 for the system and $24.99 a month.

After the presentation, TC TV got a chance to catch up with Marthin De Beer, Cisco’s SVP of the Emerging Technologies Group, and asked him to justify Umi’s price. See parts of our demo and the interview with De Beer above.

According to De Beer, Umi is like a fine “piece of chocolate,” insofar as it’s impossible to define it’s worth without a little taste. He’s relying on in-store Best Buy demos and Oprah Winfrey’s use of the technology on her show, to give the mainstream US consumer a “taste” of Umi. That will certainly sway some early adopters but it’s hard to imagine Umi as this year’s must-have stocking stuffer— not even the magic of “O” can do that. Although Cisco may have a long slog ahead in the US there is at least one place where tens of thousands of Umis will rule the land: South Korea.

Cisco is currently working with developers and Korea’s government to build New Songdo from the ground-up, a futuristic, 1,5000-acre green city, where Cisco will provide the digital infrastructure. That digital artillery will include everything from the city’s main network technologies to telepresence screens (aka Umis) in every household in New Songdo— turning the Umi, De Beer says, into something as standard as a dishwasher.

That’s certainly one way for Cisco to get inside the living room.

The Verizon iPhone rumor is as old as the iPhone itself. So whenever anyone trots it out, you take it with a grain of salt. It’s like The Beatles coming to iTunes. It will happen eventually, but who knows when. That said, today’s Wall Street Journal report about Verizon readying to launch the iPhone in early 2011 has all the makings of a good old Apple-controlled leak once again. And so it may be time to really believe.

Now, I of course don’t know for sure that Apple fed WSJ this story — but let’s look at the recent history. In January, as rumors were swirling about the iPad, the WSJ had a story suggesting the tablet computer could run around $1,000. At the time, I pointed out why this reeked of Apple setting expectations low so they could blow them out of the water. A few days later, a former Marketing Manager at Apple backed this up. The result? Steve Jobs on stage announcing the iPad would start at just $499. Boom.

This past July, rumors were swirling that Apple would have to recall the iPhone 4 due to its antenna. When Apple called a surprise press conference, these rumors only intensified. But one day before the event, there was the WSJ again with the story that Apple would not be recalling the device. Again, this seemed to be all about setting expectations. The next day, did Apple recall the device? Nope. But no one panicked because everyone knew they weren’t going to.

If you go back to last year, on June 19, Apple had their most successful product launch ever (at the time) with the iPhone 3GS. That night, after the stock market had closed, WSJ broke the news that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had undergone a liver transplant months earlier while on his medical leave of absence. The timing of such a scoop was curious at best — and there’s no denying that the timing was advantageous to Apple. Jobs was said to be fine, and returning to work shortly.

What did all of those stories have in common? Each was authored or co-authored by WSJ reporter Yukari Iwatani Kane. And guess who co-authored today’s Verizon iPhone story as well? Yep.

So why would Apple want to leak such news? Well that’s obvious. News of a Verizon iPhone would quickly quiet all the talk of Android’s momentum against the iPhone in the U.S. marketplace. That talk, backed up by report after report after report, is louder than it has ever been. Android is clearly outpacing the iPhone in terms of sales in this country. And the media is latching on to that story big time.

Considering the disproportionate amount of money Apple makes from the iPhone (billions) versus what Google makes so far from Android (next to nothing), you might think Apple wouldn’t care about this. But indications are that they do. Jobs takes thinly veiled shots at Android all the time (often in response to not-so-thinly veiled shots from Google). And his leaked talk with employees at the beginning of the year makes it clear that he feels threatened by Android.

Again, given Apple’s success and proven model, they probably shouldn’t care. It’s simply not really a fair fight. But they do. And the Verizon iPhone is proof of that.

And today marks a particularly interesting day because there is a tidal wave of new Android devices that have been announced at or around CTIA here in San Francisco. In the mobile world right now, it’s Android, Android, Android. And it’s not just consumers that are sensing this — it’s the all-important developers too. And considering that Apple only puts out new phones once a year, in the Summer, they have nothing to counter with. Except the Verizon iPhone.

The WSJ story also notes that a fifth generation iPhone is in the works as well. But that’s obvious. That’s on the same schedule as all of the previous iPhones. In fact, this fifth generation iPhone has probably been in the works for two years now. The key to the story is that Pegatron will be mass-producing a CDMA iPhone by the end of the year, and Verizon will be selling it.

This is actually the second Verizon iPhone rumor Kane has reported in recent months. But the first one, in March, was careful not to specifically say that Verizon would be getting the iPhone — just that Apple was working on a CDMA version of the device. All indications are that this is true, and has been true for some time — we’ve heard the same thing. But that story may have just been to whet people’s appetite with the hint of Verizon. Today’s is the meat.

And interestingly enough, the original version of today’s story said the exact same thing: just that a CDMA version of the iPhone was coming. It was later changed to specifically name Verizon as the provider it would appear on. Some people weren’t getting the message clearly enough, it seems.

Some of the Verizon-specific additions:

Apple Inc. is making a version of its iPhone that Verizon Wireless will sell early next year

Verizon Wireless has been meeting with Apple, adding capacity and testing its networks to prepare for the heavy data load by iPhone users, according to one person familiar with the matter. The carrier is seeking to avoid the kind of public-relations hit that AT&T took when the boom in data-hungry iPhones overtaxed its network, especially in New York and San Francisco.

Apple originally decided against developing a phone for Verizon to focus on a version based on GSM, a more prevalent mobile technology used by AT&T and most mobile operators in the world, people familiar with the decisions have said.

Verizon, in those earlier discussions, balked at Apple’s requirement that Verizon not allow its retail partners to sell the phone, people familiar with the discussion said at the time. Verizon also declined to give up its ability to sell content like music and videos through its proprietary service, these people said.

That last part in particular scares me. While I will absolutely be the first person in line to buy an iPhone that runs on Verizon’s network. There’s a difference between that and a Verizon iPhone. The iPhone that Verizon wants to sell undoubtedly is loaded up with the same crap they now load on their Android phones. Since Verizon has leverage now with Android’s popularity, will Apple have to give in to some of Verizon’s demands? I hope not, but I’m worried.

If Apple really does care about U.S. market share — and again, indications are that they actually do — they need Verizon more than Verizon needs them. And that’s a bad place to be in — and one Apple isn’t used to in recent years.

Is it possible that if this is a leak, Apple is simply using it as a negotiating ploy once again? Maybe. But it seems like there’s too much smoke — all the CDMA reports, AT&T saying dumb things about how they’re not scared to lose the iPhone, and the fact that Apple really does need another carrier if it wants to continue growing in the U.S. — for there not to be truth to the rumors this time.

So I’m cautiously optimistic now that come January I’ll have a phone that actually works as a phone. It just better not have that V CAST crap on it. And it better come in white.

Google has Google Instant. Bing has guided search and (soon) swimming whale videos on its home page. Yahoo, well, Yahoo now has an expanding accordion search box. Starting today, when you do searches related to music, movies, or news, a set of results will be packaged together at the top in a box with vertical tabs along the side. It is similar to Google’s Universal Search Onebox and the Bing Box, except that the vertical tabs create four or five expanding search boxes in one.

When you do a search for “Lady Gaga,” for instance, the default box is an overview with an excerpt from her bio, link to her official site, and photos, but there are also tabs for nearby events, albums, videos, and Twitter. The Twitter tab is further divided into her official Tweets, Tweets from Hollywood Insiders, and Tweets from “Everyone” (although it is not really from everyone, Yahoo filters out spam and bots).

Similarly, for news, the tabs are divided into stories, images, videos, and Twitter. And for movies, you get an overview with links to trailers, and a tab with showtimes near you. Yahoo also has a partnership with Netflix to link directly to that movie on Netflix, where it can be added to your queue. (Yahoo won’t get paid for each movie that people add to their Netflix list, but will get paid a bounty for new members who sign up for Netflix). These tabs will also be for sale to search advertisers who may want to sponsor one.

If you do a search for a trending search topic, chances are you will get a slideshow in the search box, along with photo sand information. (Yahoo loves search-generated slideshows). Yahoo is also adding slideshow results to its image search. The top result will now often show a box with related slideshows from different public domain image banks such as Flickr.

Finally, Yahoo’s mobile search is adopting HTML5 so that it can show better looking tabs, image search results, and stock charts when applicable.

It looks like Digg is trying to resurrect inactive users, according to an email sent to us by a reader. Apparently Digg sent out the email to users in hopes of trying to get those who are inactive back to the site. As the email states, “Come Alive On Digg. A Lot Has Changed Since You Were Last On Digg. Resurrect Yourself.”

It could be a joke alluding to Halloween, which is just around the corner. But even if it is a play on the upcoming holiday, the image is a little morbid considering the recent course of events for Digg. Since Digg launched its new site design in August, the site has been plagued with trouble, including backlash from users, downtime and an executive shuffle. According to ComScore, Digg’s U.S. unique visitors dropped from 14.3 million in January to 8.8 million in August.

Digg’s Kevin Rose took the stage recently at TechCrunch Disrupt last week, admitting that he’s made a lot of mistakes but also seemed optimistic about future product enhancements.

Earlier today, Facebook held a special event to unveil a totally revamped Groups product, a new data export option, and a dashboard to help you monitor third-party apps that you’ve linked with Facebook.  In short, it’s a huge day for the company  — the result of a 60-day Lockdown period this summer, during which Facebook employees had their noses to the grindstone even more than usual (the sign above is actually hanging inside of Facebook HQ).

Following the event, I had the chance to sit down with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Justin Shaffer, who founded Hot Potato (which Facebook acquired in August) and is now Product Manager for the revamped Groups. The interview, which you can read in its entirety below, touches on a few topics: the timing of the announcements, which may be a preemptive strike against Google’s upcoming social strategy Google Me; the rationale for allowing users to download their data now, after years of advocacy groups asking for such functionality; and even Facebook’s recently-granted patent on location services, which Zuckerberg hints won’t be used offensively.

 

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Jason Kincaid: My first question concerns the timing on this. There's been a lot of rumors about Google Me or a Google social network of some kind — how does this play into that? Are these features that have been on the drawing board for a long time and it's just coincidental that they've come out at this point?

 

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah. It's really tough to time an announcement. Our methodology around this is normally just to work and work, and when it's ready we announce it. The whole Lockdown thing came about because we saw that we had a bunch of different projects that were about ready to go into their final intense push and get launched in the next couple of months. So we decided to rally the whole company around this  — we said, "we're going to focus on a few of these things and put all of our energy behind those". So we tried to launch these in that period, and it turns out it's a week after, which isn't a big deal — it's fine. That's really the main push. I don't know what the exact timing was. It might have been that in May there was so much energy around all the privacy stuff that was going on that there was kind of this lull in new development and then there was a big wave of things that were ready to go.

Jason Kincaid: So these could have been pushed back a bit because of Instant Personalization and…(the rest of the privacy debate)..?

Mark Zuckberberg: There may have been something internally.. We were just as a company so focused on getting privacy right at that point that we stopped thinking about a bunch of other things and then once we were done working on that wave of privacy-related things, we had around eight new products that were all on-deck to launch.

Jason Kincaid: And there are still more coming that weren't part of this suite of products?

Mark Zuckerberg: Yes there will be a few more.. some good ones…

Jason Kincaid: Like a redesign maybe?

Mark Zuckerberg: I don't know where that rumor came from. It depends on what you call a redesign. I mean, Groups…

Jason Kincaid: My impression from what we'd reported is that Facebook Profiles would look more similar to the Places pages.

Mark Zuckerberg: I don't know…

Justin Shaffer: Yeah I read that yesterday on TechCrunch and was sort of curious..

Mark Zuckerberg: I don't think we're working on an aesthetic redesign. But there's a bunch of other stuff that I'm pretty excited about that will come out in the next couple of months.

Jason Kincaid: Justin, I know you just joined around two months ago? Am I correct in assuming that the Groups product was already under way at that point or did you ..

Mark Zuckerberg: It was underway but it wouldn't have gotten finished.

Justin Shaffer: I will take that compliment, thank you *laughs*. But yeah, there was a team that had already come together. One of the things about Lockdown though was that, as Mark said, the whole company really rallied around this. As we're getting this stuff done — like Places launched and then the Games event two weeks ago — everybody just puts their heads down for whatever it takes to get done. It's really exciting to be part of a culture and organization like that. I'm having the time of my life. It's really fun. And so for Groups, the amount of people within Facebook and engineering and product across the company that this touched. We were basically living in the office to launch and everyone was really fired up to get it done. I don't think you could characterize this as being all me..

Mark Zuckerberg: We have had this interesting strategy, we're trying to build a really entrepreneurial company and culture. One of the ways we've focused on doing that has been just to get people who we think are running really interesting companies to join. That's why we bought Hot Potato — to make sure you [Shaffer] and a couple of other folks joined. That strategy has worked really well for us so far.

Jason Kincaid: Now a question about this Data Portability announcement.. I know this is something that people have been complaining about for as long as I can remember — what made this possible now? Is it the fact that you have David Recordon on now? My understanding is that there were privacy challenges that made it difficult to do this before and I'm wondering how you cleared those.

Mark Zuckerberg: I think that this is a pretty big step forward in terms of making it so that people can download all of their information, but it isn't going to be all of what everyone wants. There are going to be questions about why you can't download your friend's information too. And it's because it's your friend's and not yours. But you can see that information on Facebook, so maybe you should be able to download it… those are some of the grey areas.

So for this, what we decided to do was stick to content that was completely clear. You upload those photos and videos and wall posts and messages, and you can take them out and they're yours, undisputed — that's your profile. There's going to be more that we need to think through over time. One of the things, we just couldn't understand why people kept on saying there's no way to export your information from Facebook because we have Connect, which is the single biggest large-scale way that people bring information from one site to another that I think has ever been built.

Justin Shaffer: It's crazy as a former Connect developer, you can pull a lot of information out of Facebook…

Mark Zuckerberg: So then all of these people say they want a .ZIP file, so we said, Ok let's give them a .ZIP file. If it's meaningful to have it in that format and make it so that you can have it on your computer, then we want to do that. We implemented it on top of the Graph API to show that this is part of the broader Connect program. And we made it pretty too. So it isn't just a Zip file that sits there — it's really a cool product. If you download your information and scroll through, it's pretty mesmerizing. And then think about downloading different copies and look back at how your FB account was at different times in the future.

Jason Kincaid: This goes back to the timing issue. I read some initial reaction to the Data Portability launch, and it talked about how you are so big now that it doesn't really matter if you let everyone take their data with them. Does that play into this at all?

Mark Zuckerberg: I think we just think it's the right thing to do.

Jason Kincaid: So it's more of a fundamental part of the company philosophy that you just hadn't gotten around to implementing yet?

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah. There's a lot of stuff that we want to do that we haven't gotten around to doing yet. It's something that people here believe really strongly — that you own your information. But it's interesting, there were questions that I think got to all of the tensions, like "Well isn't this dangerous? What if someone hacks your computer after you have this file?"

And it's like — yeah, that's an issue. But then the question is, what's better? To build up all these walls so that nothing bad ever happens or to give people control of their information and let all that innovation happen. And I think in reality, philosophically we're so far on the side of being open and giving people complete ownership and control because it's their information. And in practice we're trying to mediate all this stuff and make it as good as possible.

Jason Kincaid: Going back to the Groups, how does this play into the Like button, the Share button. I know Facebook is getting really broad distribution in terms of how people are sharing across the web, and it seems like one thing I would like to do is share a given post with one of my Groups as opposed to everyone's News Feed.

Justin Shaffer: It's an awesome use case for social plugins, if you want to control distribution of that action. It isn't something we've built for this first release.

Mark Zuckerberg: Actually I don't know, I think this might automatically be built into the composer. I'm not sure exactly how this is implemented, but we designed it so that we could build a block that gets inherited into a lot of products. When you write a status today there's a little lock that lets you pick who you want to share it with — you can just set in that you want to just share with a group.

Jason Kincaid: Does that composer appear when I hit the share button on a third party site?

Mark Zuckerberg: That I don't know off the top of my head. But if not today, then in a matter of months we'll have that sorted out. We built the architecture so that it could support that.

Jason Kincaid: One question that is totally unrelated to any of this: this morning there was a post saying that Facebook had been granted a patent on location, in terms of associating location data with a status update. Is that something that Facebook will use defensively or do you anticipate possibly using it as leverage in negotiations with Foursquare, Gowalla, etc.?

Barry Schnitt (Director of Corporate Communications, on Facebook's PR team): I don't know of any company thatcomments on their IP strategy.

Mark Zuckerberg: I actually didn't even know we got that patent.

Barry Schnitt: We have a statement on that, but for lots of reasons that involve the effectiveness of a patent, you just don't comment on what it will be used for.

Mark Zuckerberg: I mean, you can see what we've used patents for in the past.

Jason Kincaid: I can't remember a time you've used…

Mark Zuckerberg: Exactly.

Jason Kincaid: …it offensively.

Jason Kincaid: Ok — and was there anything else you guys wanted to cover on Groups?

Mark Zuckerberg: The thing that is really important to understand about Groups — I think it's very easy to look at the announcement and say, oh it's Groups, there's been Groups products for ten years.

But it's the fact that we're building groups as a building block to do all of these other things and I think that's what is fundamental — I think a bunch of folks are probably going to miss that coming from the announcement, and just say, "oh this is groups". But I think that this has the potential really be a major step forward for this site.

Jason Kincaid: How are you going to on-board people into this? This sort of fundamentally changes how a lot of people are going to be using the site I'd expect. How are you going to introduce them to this concept?

Justin Shaffer: The messaging is pretty straightforward. We think of these as shared spaces for you and a small group of your friends. Tactically we're rolling it out very aggressively in the next week or so to our userbase, and you can get access to Groups in one of two ways: you'll either be someone who is seeded and at that point you won't have any groups and your left navbar will change. You'll have a link that says "Create a group" and we'll give you a contextual dialog that explains what’s going on. And if you are a user who likes to read about it, there's a lot of information that supports that.

The other, and perhaps more interesting way is that say, I haven't used the product and Mark adds me to a 'Facebookers Living in Palo Alto' group. I get a notification about that and am now part of the product. I can go create my own groups after that. I'm immediately in, I'm seeing content, I'm seeing what's going on. It's really simple.

Parenting focused ecommerce site EcoMom, which provides a curated shopping experience for moms, has just received $1.1 million in Series A funding from angels and VCs alike. Investors in the round include Dan Gould (founder of Newroo and Namesake), Cyan and Scott Banister, Dave McClure, Paige Craig, Sizhao Yang and David Pell as well as several angels from Angel List.

Like a Zappos for new parents, the six person company sells things to new moms keeping in mind the following strictures, “Are the products safe?” “Are the products useful?”

Ecomom targets LOHAS or the “lifestyles, health and sustainability” market, which CEO Jody Sherman pegs at $200 billion a year. Says Sherman, “If given the opportunity every mom would make the decision to purchase a product that was healthier for their child or safer.”

Likening themselves to the Diapers.com "Green" section, or Amazon Babies, Sherman says there’s no service currently curating parenting products like EcoMom which, with a network of over 13,000 mommy bloggers (growing at about 100 per month) writing product reviews, aims to be the primary resource for parents shopping for their families. "I hope to one day be as big as Zappos,” says Sherman.

But while Zappos is focused on shoes, EcoMom provides a variety of products, currently stocking an inventory of over 2000 childcare-related items in an attempt to apply the traditional ecommerce model to the social/content driven web.

This financing is a big deal for the bootstrapped startup, which went live last February and initially began with shipments of products on pallets to Sherman’s bedroom. While EcoMom is currently not-profitable, Sherman expects to be in the black before the end of next year, “This money will allow us to grow faster,” he says, planning on using the money for site redevelopment, key hires and acquiring new customers.

“And now this post will be TechCrunched and the Internet will go into an infinite loop and explode from the sheer weight of navel gazing.”

3-2-1 … Nope. No explosions. Nothing.

Yup, still here.

For those out of the (infinite) loop, we just wrote a post about attempting to break into the rapidly exploding and private Yahoo Alumni group on Facebook. And then we did, hence above.

Hiring? Then you should definitely scroll through this impressive recently inaugurated group of Yahoo alumni, currently up to 183 members despite it being less then three hours old. At the rate group membership is exploding, we’re thinking this could easily surpass the 500 mark in the next 48 hours.

No word on whether “Yahoo Alumni!” is the fastest scaling Facebook Group since Facebook launched the feature, but it is probably the most bittersweet, as there is nothing on Yahoo that would currently support this use case and, from what we’re hearing, Yahoo is pretty interested in building a Groups-eqsue product itself.

While the group is private, ambitious recruiters can cross reference the “Members” list with our posts from when it was easier to track such things, “Tracking Former Yahoo Execs – Where Are They Now?” as well as the old Yahoo Alumni Facebook page, which boasts a  whopping 3,168 members (Yahoo has around 14,100 current employees).

We’re also working on getting on the inside, and will update this post with resumes if we get a hold of any.

Update: We’re In! And they like us, they really really like us.

We just noted that Twitter quietly rolled out an entirely new search backend over the past few weeks, and nobody seemed to notice. That’s actually great news, because it means nothing went terribly wrong in the transition. But now comes the real challenge for Twitter: making search useful once again.

Twitter Search has long held the promise of something great. Original born as an independent company, Summize, when Twitter bought them in 2008, it seemed clear that they were about to get serious about search. But as scaling problems continued and escalated, and as the user base continued to grow, search took a backseat. I would bet that if you polled Twitter users now about one thing they’d like to see improved, it would be search.

As it stands, Twitter search is fine, but it’s way too basic. Yes, there is an advanced search area on the stand-alone search site, but few users probably know about it — and even less probably use it. Searches are done on twitter.com, and for those, you’re basically just getting a reverse chronological listing of tweets. Sure, this has been augmented over time by Top Tweets and Promoted Tweets, but it’s still the same basic idea.

But here’s what Twitter wrote today in announcing the new search architecture:

But you might wonder: Fine, it's faster, and you guys can scale it longer, but will there be any benefits for the users? The answer is definitely yes! The first difference you might notice is the bigger index, which is now twice as long — without making searches any slower. And, maybe most importantly, the new system is extremely versatile and extensible, which will allow us to build cool new features faster and better. Stay tuned!

Key words: Cool. New. Features.

Twitter revealed some crazy stats about search today. They’re now seeing over 12,000 queries per second, which means more than a billion queries per day. That’s a little misleading because things like Trending Topic clicks are searches too — but still, it’s a massive search engine. And while Twitter has deals to send their data to the big boys — Google and Bing — the company has indicated in the past that they may start making moves that move them much closer to the traditional search engines. With each link shared on Twitter now passing through their own t.co shortener, Twitter knows a lot about what is being shared, and that could be very valuable in an improved search.

And, as we’re all very well aware, search is highly monetizable. Twitter clearly has the volume to go there if they want (they sort of are with some Promoted Products). That’s something the new CEO surely must be thinking about.

But most of all, people just want a way to access their entire history of tweets. Sadly, right now, we have to use a third-party tool to do that (incredibly, I’m still using the long-dormant FriendFeed as my Twitter search tool). With this new backend change, Twitter says the index is bigger and twice as long — but we want it all. Hopefully Twitter is finally gearing up to give us just that with search.

A lifetime ago, back in 2004, I became a book publisher: co-founder of The Friday Project, a publishing house that promised to adapt the web's creative talent into awesome books. This wasn't print on demand, it was real, live publishing: we paid our authors (including the occasional advance), we partnered with publishing giant Macmillan for distribution and our books could be found in actual book stores.

It's hard to say if we rode the bloggers-with-book-deals wave or if we helped precipitate it. All I know is, for a brief period starting about five years into the present millennium, every online hack and her dog was being offered a six figure sum to turn her livejournal about love or sex or working in an office or cooking like Julia Child (or all of the above) into the next bestseller. Big online brands got in on the action too with Gawker and Postsecret and every other site north of a million page views being handed a fat check. There were even agents who specialised in blog-to-book deals, most notably ICM's Kate Lee who achieved her own meta-micro fame by helping high profile bloggers break through.

Twelve months later came the deluge of remaindered books. A couple of the sex books did pretty well, Julie and Julia went on to become a movie, Postsecret still hums along nicely – but the vast, vast majority of the rest sank without trace (the Gawker book is currently trading at about five copies the 1923 Deutsch Mark). The Friday Project was itself remaindered, sold to Harper Collins who have since un-acquired every member of the original team.

The conclusion, in hindsight, seems obvious: just because something makes for a popular blog, doesn't mean it's going to be an equally popular book. Books are – duh – a different medium: I might smirk at and retweet a pithy observation on Twitter but would I really pay Barnes and Noble to read it in printed form? And given the size of the advances – Stuff White People Like sold for a reported $300,000 – they didn't have to just shift copies to be considered succesful, they had to become bestsellers.

Today, generally speaking, publishers have learned to assess online talent for its literary potential rather than being bamboozled by hype. Certainly only a fucking idiot would throw good money at an author – not to mention the associated development costs – simply on the basis of some ethereal web traffic numbers.

CUT TO: A room full of television producers.

The first episode of "Bleep My Dad Says" aired last month. Adapted by CBS from the almost-eponymous Twitter account "Shit My Dad Says" the show was a critical flop, despite the fact that the account's author, Justin Halpern, is a professional screenwriter. Viewers apparently agreed with the critics: the show lost two million viewers between the first two episodes.

Unperturbed, CBS is ploughing ahead with it's blog-to-broadcast spree, signing up "Shh… Don't Tell Steve", a Twitter stream of things overheard from the author's roommate, Steve. I shit you not. CBS is clearly trying to own the "things people I live with just said" space. And good luck to them.

Over at ABC they've just signed a "script plus penalty" deal with Sony Pictures for a show based on AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com, created by Mike Bender and Doug Chernack. ("Script plus penalty" essentially means that Sony – and the site's creators – get paid no matter whether a pilot is subsequently made). Quite what a show based on some awkward photographs will look like is unclear – just thinking about it makes my brain hurt – but between the subject matter and the precedent set by Bleep My Dad Says, it's reasonably safe to say the results won't be pretty.

There's a saying, credited to George Santayana, that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Like publishers before them, TV studios are terrified by the exodus of their core audience, particularly the younger segments of it, to the Internet (the fact that many of those escapees are turning to the Internet to watch TV shows like House or Glee doesn't seem to matter.) In response, producers have decided that the only way to compete with the web is by throwing money at spin-off shows that started life online, no matter how abstract the concept or how high the cost of acquisition. And, like book publishers before them, it's likely to take them at least a year – and a dozen more dreadful pilots – before they realise the embarrassing error of their ways: that just because something makes a good blog or Twitter account doesn’t mean it will make a successful TV show.

In the meantime, check your local listings for shows like Craigslist: Miami, Celebrity Foursquares and Dancing With Lolcats, coming soon to a TV screen near you…

…

A Postscript on AOL/TC…

I should probably clear something up. In my last column I acknowledged the screaming inevitability of me being fired by AOL. Some readers inferred the reverse: that I'd decided to quit in some fit of pique over the acquisition of TechCrunch by (and I quote myself) "America's number one killer of startups". My inbox steadily filled up with subject lines like "Have you really quit?" or "Woah!" or "No!" or "Yes!". I'm no longer on Twitter, but I gather similar noises were made there.

Here – to save my tired fingers – is the answer: no, I haven't quit AOL-TC – not least because, as I’m technically a contractor (the Untermenschen of the corporate world) no-one from AOL has spoken a single word to me since the take-over. It's hard to quit a job you haven't been offered. It’s also incredibly liberating to exist in this kind of limbo.

That said – I've made (and will continue to make) no secret of my fear that our new corporate structure will mean the end of TechCrunch as I know and love it. I've seen what happens when big dumb companies acquire small awesome ones, and it's much like what happens when you let a drunk elephant play with a blind kitten. I'd be an idiot to expect otherwise. But at the same time I have a huge amount of affection and loyalty towards Heather, Mike and the TechCrunch team so I'm in no hurry to rush out the door simply because it would be the cool and independent thing to do. TechCrunch is dysfunctional as all hell, but I like it here.

So, like Milton in Office Space, I'm planning on tapping away here for the time being: until either it stops being fun, I stop getting paid ("we. fixed. the. glitch.") someone revokes my login credentials, or someone in AOL's New York head office decides to drop by my virtual desk with some helpful suggestions on language and tone.

And while I await the inevitable, the least I can do is to continue sharing with you the amusing things that I've been privy to since the takeover. Like the moment last week where an HR person strolled up to Alexia's desk and asked her "are you MG?" (Alexia claims she's flattered by the mistake). Or the fact that the quality of AOL's welcome gifts appears to directly correlate with the reported valuation of your acquisition. Employees of TechCrunch (reported sale value: $50m) received bottles of $7 wine in AOL carrier bags (thanks) while the Brizzly folks (reported sale value: $6m) were given branded staplers. Really. AOL staplers. Isn't that fucking tremendous?

And I said, I don’t care if they lay me off either, because I told, I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time, then, then I’m, I’m quitting, I’m going to quit. And, and I told Don too, because they’ve moved my desk four times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were merry, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn’t bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it’s not okay because if they take my stapler then I’ll set the building on fire…

- Milton

While everyone was busy trying out New Twitter or tweeting about how they want New Twitter, Twitter itself was doing something secret behind the scenes. The startup quietly flipped the switch on an entirely new backend for their search, they reveal in a blog post today.

“One of our main goals, but also biggest challenges, was a smooth switch from the old architecture to the new one, without any downtime or inconsistencies in search results,” they write in the post. Mission: accomplished, it seems, as no one outside of Twitter even seemed to be aware that they switched anything.

Twitter notes that they had to build this new backend because they were still using the search technology that they acquired in the Summize deal. Obviously, that tech was great at the time, but Twitter was much smaller at the time of that deal; they’ve grown massively since then. “Scaling the old MySQL-based system had become increasingly challenging,” they note.

So what is this new search? “Since we love Open Source here at Twitter we chose Lucene, a search engine library written in Java, as a starting point,” Twitter notes in the post. But they say that they had to modify it give their demands for real-time search. What type of demands? These types of demands:

Our demands on the new system are immense: With over 1,000 TPS (Tweets/sec) and 12,000 QPS (queries/sec) = over 1 billion queries per day (!) we already put a very high load on our machines. As we want the new system to last for several years, the goal was to support at least an order of magnitude more load.

They also have a goal of indexing a tweet after it’s tweeted in less than 10 seconds.

Twitter says that any custom work they did/do on Lucene will be put back into the open source.

And the new system, which again, has been rolling out for a few weeks now, seems to be working. Twitter estimates that they’re only using about 5 percent of the available backend resources. They say the new indexer could also run 50 times more tweets per second than they currently get. In other words, it will scale.

More: A Billion Queries A Day Later, Twitter Finally Working On Search Again

Now I’m not sure if he was actually paid for this, and it genuinely looks like former Black Eyed Peas artist will.i.am loves Twitter. But something’s up with this 1:27 long entreaty to “Check it out,” which includes such gems as Will tweeting “Can I get a redesign up in here?” and showing off the geolocational features, how to create a list and how to complete a vanity search in case you can’t figure it out. To Will’s credit, #NewTwitter is, admittedly, complicated.

Also bizarre: Samuel L. Jackson yelling “Check this motherfucker out” at the end. I basically can’t get that out of my head now.

Located on a nondescript block in San Francisco’s Mission district is HipMunk HQ, a simple townhouse with a dark green trim. The travel startup’s operations are concentrated in just the first two rooms on the first floor— the rest is living space for Hipmunk’s co-founders, Adam Goldstein and Steve Huffman, formerly of Reddit. The approximate 300 square feet is more than enough space for the fledgling flight search engine, which is made up of three full-time employees (including the co-founders) and a couple of part-time workers.

The idea is to outgrow the space as cash trickles in from the site’s flight purchases (according to the team, they’ve been technically profitable since their August launch) and their latest angel round, a $1 million pool backed by investors like Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Paul Buchheit.

As initially reported and later confirmed by Huffman, the last round of financing was highly competitive with “dozens” of prospective investors vying for the Y-Combinator startup. Many gave up when they saw the higher than average valuation (greater than $4 M, less than $10 M) but as evidenced by the final roll call, more than a few were ready to sign the dotted line.

So why the fuss? Why do we care about a stylish, ambiguously hip-ster(?) chipmunk with an obnoxiously adorable periwinkle scarf? TC TV dropped by 75 Sharon St. to find out.

For starters, the “Hipmunk” mascot is a product of Goldstein’s imagination, borne more out of necessity than whimsy. Like many startups in today’s Silicon Valley, Goldstein was struggling to find an apropo domain that was topical and more importantly, available. After dangerously flirting with (and even purchasing) domains like BouncePounce.com and Trot.me, Goldstein’s girlfriend told him to identify a cute mammal that he could build a brand around. Hipmunk fit the bill.

The site itself is designed to be the kernel of a fully formed travel search engine—- when and if Goldstein and Huffman get around to launching new verticals for accommodations, rental cars, international editions, etc. Although much attention has been paid to the visual nature of Hipmunk’s search results— all the results for a query appear on a one-page graph, optimized for the shortest and cheapest flights and color-coded by airline— the founding team says the site is not designed to be a visualization of travel search, just intuitive. Thus the upcoming verticals may look radically different than the flight category but all will follow basic principles of logic, something Goldstein and Huffman say has been largely deficient in this industry.

Borrowing a mantra he used at Reddit, Huffman says Hipmunk’s goal is to be, in two words, “not horrible.”

However, in order for Hipmunk to be “not horrible,” the site will have to quickly expand its database which currently only includes flights from Orbitz.

For a site that aims to reduce agony, and even includes an “agony” button, the last thing a consumer wants is to feel compelled to use Hipmunk in tandem with other sites to compare prices and features.

That hasn’t been an easy battle but doors are opening as Hipmunk’s hype builds.
In fact, when Hipmunk was just starting out, Orbitz was the only one to take their call— many of the traditional carriers ignored Hipmunk or delayed discussion (likely jaded by the slew of travel startups that have emerged in the last decade, all promising to be the next Expedia).  Now, according to Goldstein, they’re taking his calls and Hipmunk is on track to roll out several new partnerships later this year. The team is also renegotiating terms with Orbitz thanks to the steady rise in sales (to date, Hipmunk users have completed “millions” of dollars in ticket sales, according to the founders). Currently, Orbitz pays Hipmunk the standard rate of $3 per flight sold.

See full video above.

Here’s a quick video on the origin of Hipmunk:

PayPal first announced the eventual roll out of a specialized micropayments product in August, which would allow businesses to collect micropayments on the web via PayPal. Today, the company has confirmed to TechCrunch that it will be launching a ‘digital goods optimized product,’ a.k.a. a payments technology for micropayments, in a few weeks at the company’s developer conference, Innovate,. PayPal has also formed a number of high-profile partnerships with companies to implement the digital goods product, which will also be announced at the conference.

In order to best understand how big this feature could be, it’s important to know what PayPal includes in its definition of “digital goods.” According to the company, the new product will include specialized payment support for micropayments for online video, music, games (including the sale of virtual goods and currencies), paid content, books and software.

We’re told that PayPal wants to replicate the act of putting another quarter in a gaming machine to continue to play a game, except in an online equivalent. The company wants to lower the friction point of leaving things, whether that be within a game, while reading content, or watching videos.

While PayPal declined to name its partners for the new product, we do know that the companies who are selling the most in digital goods using PayPal are Zynga, Blizzard, Apple (via iTunes) and Gaia Online. Both Zynga and Apple would be ideal initial partners for PayPal considering the vast amount of transactions that flow through both platform.

This product will no doubt bring in a whole lot of cash for PayPal. In 2009 alone, PayPal processed more than $2 billion in transactions for digital goods (out of $72 billion in total). In the first half of 2010, the company has processed more than $1.3 billion, and is in track to see $3 billion by the end of the year. In fact, over 50 percent of direct in-app transactions for virtual goods within social gaming environments are going through PayPal.

According to the most recent "Inside Virtual Goods" report, the micropayments and the virtual goods alone market is expected to grow by 51 percent from 2009 to 2010. More than $500 million in total virtual goods transactions occurred on social networking platforms in the US in 2009, and this number is expected to double in 2010.

Video content is also a big money maker. Downloaded video content is a $467 million market in the US today; however, Forrester forecasts it will grow to more than $900 million by 2013.

If you want to catch PayPal’s announcement live, you can by tickets to the conference here. And PayPal is running a special promotion until Friday; if you enter the code TWEET between 11am PT on Tuesday and 12 am PT Friday, you will get access to Innovate for only $49.

The third quarter IPO market is like looking at a Rorshach test: You can find data to support that liquidity is getting better or data to support that it’s getting worse.

Here’s the reality check: There is an increase in deals– a big increase if you look at the first nine months of the year and compare it to the first nine months of 2009. And the pipeline is building: 67 new companies entered IPO registration since July, and if they go out, they could be the biggest issues so far this year.

Let’s hope that’s the case because the downside to the news is that deal value is falling substantially year-over-year. In the third quarter of 2010, there were 32 IPOs, compared to just 20 in the third quarter of 2009. But only one was valued at more than $500 million. (All numbers are courtesy of PricewaterhouseCoopers’s third quarter IPO watch.)

That means the deals going out are small and when you’re talking about venture capital returns, the smaller the deal the more thinly it’s traded. In essence, a lot of these “exits” aren’t really exits at all because VCs aren’t getting much liquidity. If they sell their shares, they tank the stock. In practice, some of them may give investors less liquidity than some late-stage secondary rounds out there.

There’s another ripple effect to anemic deal values– it hurts the price of acquisitions because there’s no threat to anyone going public. Think of it like listing a house on a market and getting one bidder. That bidder has all the power.

The quarters when deal values have been higher, the top line numbers were heavily skewed by a few large deals– and most of those are coming from other countries, especially China. Year-to-date, 30 non-US companies have raised $4.1 billion, about 30% of both proceeds and total offerings. And 19 Chinese companies have made up about 20% of the deal volume. Yep, they’ve taken over Japan in GDP, taken over US manufacturing, it’s the world’s largest Web audience and now Chinese companies are making up one-third of own IPO volume.

Get used to it, America. Beyond China, more nascent emerging markets are taking advantage of the overall smaller deal sizes to IPO on more prestigious and stable US exchanges. India’s online travel site MakeMyTrip went public in August and had a 90% first day pop. It has held up well since, opening the door for more mid-sized ecommerce companies from countries under represented on the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange. Argentina’s outsourcing firm Globant is still eying an exit in the next year, and there are no doubt some issues coming from Brazil. It’s all about growth when you’re talking about IPOs this small and until a Facebook or LinkedIn IPO steals the attention, emerging markets are the best growth story out there.

Last night, we noted that after a two-month “lockdown” Facebook was emerging with the fruits of their labor today. We heard that the likely result would be a site redesign, but obviously, that didn’t come. Instead, Facebook rolled out a few new features such as a way to download your information, a dashboard for connected apps, and, most notably, a completely revamped Groups feature. That being said, the redesign is still coming, we hear. And it shouldn’t be too long.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the event today by acknowledging that they have been in what they call “lockdown” for several weeks. And he indicated that the result of it would be several new launches over the coming weeks and months. One of those will be a redesign, which is meant to unify the look of the site.

If you look at it right now, Facebook has a few different types of looks. Profile pages are different from Places pages and the new Groups pages, for example. Soon, they will all look like Groups and Places, which are Facebook’s two newest products. The tabs you see on your current profile will be replaced by a left-hand nav, we hear. Facebook Chat should also move over the the left-hand side of the screen. And there will likely be several other subtle tweaks to make everything look the same.

So, we apologize for the lockdown redesign premature alarm — but look for it in the coming weeks. And depending on how much you use Groups and Places, it shouldn’t be too drastic.

At the huge Facebook overhaul event in Palo Alto today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a feature that allows users data portability (Hallelujah). One thing that Zuckerberg kept emphasizing during this talk was that although it’s been a key focus over the past couple of years, Facebook Connect is now one of the two pronged ways that people can use Facebook to leave a footprint on the web. He also kept repeating the key stat that it is now being used on over one million websites.

According to registrar Whois, there are 123,309,807 live .com, .net, .org, .info, .bis, and .us domains on the Internet currently, so we’re guestimating the service is now integrated on less than 1% of all top level domains.