The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally.

James X. Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet policy group, said the proposal had “huge implications” and challenged “fundamental elements of the Internet revolution” ”” including its decentralized design.

“They are really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the Internet,” he said. “They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.”

But law enforcement officials contend that imposing such a mandate is reasonable and necessary to prevent the erosion of their investigative powers.

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Google chief executive Eric Schmidt on Friday said that Microsoft’s Bing search engine was the company’s main threat, not Facebook or Apple.

“While it’s true Web search is not the only game in town, searching information is what it is all about,” Schmidt said in Wall Street Journal interview video posted online.

He described Apple as a well-respected competitor and Facebook as a “company of consequence doing an excellent job in social networking,” but said that Microsoft’s latest-generation search engine was Google’s main competition.

“We consider neither to be a competitive threat,” Schmidt said, referring to Facebook and Apple. “Absolutely, our competitor is Bing. Bing is a well-run, highly competitive search engine.”

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Lately, stories about Google often seem to be stories about conflict ”” Google knocking heads with China or the Justice Department or Facebook.

For Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, that is a good sign. “This is winning,” he said this week, speaking to a group of reporters at Google’s Zeitgeist conference in Arizona. “If we were losing, we would not have these problems.”

Mr. Schmidt gave a few updates on those conflicts and rivalries, as well as some others. Expect to see social tools from Google this fall, he said, but do not expect a brand new social network. Instead, Google will add social components to its core products.

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Rachel Goldstein and Ben Kuryk try not to let 1,055 miles come between them.

Both 26, they met as freshmen at American University in Washington, D.C. But when they graduated in 2006, Kuryk got a job with a software company in the area, while Goldstein’s job as a commercial real estate broker took her to Miami Beach.

They talk four or five times a day by phone and communicate via text messages, Twitter and Skype. They see each other every three to four weeks.

“We’re professionals at this,” Goldstein says.

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So much for press solidarity. “Here’s your moron of the week” is the way The Daily Beast website described Washington Post journalist Mike Wise after he played a practical joke that blew up in his face. Mr Wise has built a reputation as one of America’s top basketball reporters. He has a radio show. He does interviews. And ”“ fatefully ”“ he stays in contact with his readers through Twitter. On Monday, Mr Wise “tweeted” three fake news stories. One concerned how long a suspension Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger would receive for alleged off-field misconduct. Mr Wise wrote: “Roethlisberger will get five games, I’m told.” The Miami Herald, The Baltimore Sun and NBC’s Pro Football Talk blog all cited the tweet.

Mr Wise then revealed that the story was a hoax ”“ or, to put it charitably, a piece of freelance sociological fieldwork. Mr Wise had been critical of online “aggregators” who do not source their own stories or check facts independently. He explained, in an apology posted on Twitter, that he had been trying to “test the accuracy of social media reporting”. The Post, having suffered enough from his mistweetment, suspended him for a month.

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Three sets of walls are being built. The first is national. China’s “great firewall” already imposes tight controls on internet links with the rest of the world, monitoring traffic and making many sites or services unavailable. Other countries, including Iran, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam, have done similar things, and other governments are tightening controls on what people can see and do on the internet.

Second, companies are exerting greater control by building “walled gardens”””an approach that appeared to have died out a decade ago. Facebook has its own closed, internal e-mail system, for example. Google has built a suite of integrated web-based services. Users of Apple’s mobile devices access many internet services through small downloadable software applications, or apps, rather than a web browser. By dictating which apps are allowed on its devices, Apple has become a gatekeeper. As apps spread to other mobile devices, and even cars and televisions, other firms will do so too.

Third, there are concerns that network operators looking for new sources of revenue will strike deals with content providers that will favour those websites prepared to pay up.

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Glenn Manjorin, a Ringwood resident, hosts one of the many groups that take place around the New York/New Jersey metro area, and invited Suburban Trends to the Christ Episcopal Church in Suffern, N.Y. to take a look at how the other side of the recession is coping with what the media labels as “the new normal.”

Manjorin, who previously was a computer disaster recovery specialist and business continuity planner at IBM, is no stranger to how the recession is making people adjust their habits.

He explained that the group helps members out with what they labeled as the “elevator speech,” which emphasizes saying your name at the beginning and end of the speech, as well as keeping your work details within a 30-second timeframe to pitch to potential employers.

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Grandma is posting a photo on Facebook.

Grandpa is looking for former colleagues on LinkedIn.

And more and more people ages 50 and older are joining social networks, according to a new report by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. The study found that social networking has almost doubled among this population ”” growing from 22 percent to 42 percent over the past year.

According to comScore, a digital measurement company, 27.4 million people age 55 and over engaged in social networking in July, up from 16 million one year ago.

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An open alternative to Facebook will be launched on 15 September, the developers of the project have said.

Diaspora describes itself as a “privacy-aware, personally-controlled” social network.

The open-source project made headlines earlier this year when Facebook was forced to simplify its privacy settings, after they were criticised for being overly complex and confusing.

The project, developed by four US students, raised $200,000 (£140,000).

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There is a twitter feed on the left which is very helpful, as well as a lot of other information. Check it out.

Google Inc. has warily watched the rise of social-networking site Facebook Inc. Now the Internet companies are bringing their rivalry to a new area: the race for local business-ad dollars.

On Wednesday, Facebook announced an initiative called Facebook Places, which allows its users to share their physical locations online. It paves the way for the start-up to become a player in the growing Web business of supplying local information and advertising.

The rollout of Facebook Places follows the launch of Google Places in April. Google Places, building on prior Google business listings, offers up Web pages dedicated to individual businesses, showing where they are located, street-level images, and customer reviews of services or products, be it Joe’s Pizza or the dry cleaner. Businesses can also advertise through their Google Place pages.

With these services, both Google and Facebook are attempting to organize and provide information about any location, including schools, parks, and tens of millions of local businesses.

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“The Web is dead” proclaims the September issue of Wired Magazine. Hard to believe, given how much time people spend online. But Chris Anderson, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, tells Steve Inskeep that the end of the web is likely just the next evolutionary step for the Internet.

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Mr. Schmidt is familiar with the game””as chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems in the 1990s, he was a chief fomenter of the antitrust assault on Bill Gates & Co. Now that the tables are turned, he says, Google will persevere and prevail by doing what he says Microsoft failed to do””make sure its every move is “good for consumers” and “fair” to competitors.

Uh huh. Google takes a similarly generous view of its own motives on the politically vexed issue of privacy. Mr. Schmidt says regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right, since they will walk away the minute Google does anything with their personal information they find “creepy….”

Mr. Schmidt is surely right…that the questions go far beyond Google. “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says.

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In 1993, not so terribly long ago, I signed up for my first e-mail account. I remember using it to compose and exchange haikus with other novice faculty about our daily travails, to keep up with friends from graduate school, and to sign up for more electronic mailing lists than I could possibly follow.

One year later, while I was still goofing around with my new electronic toy, cultural critic Sven Birkerts wrote in The Gutenberg Elegies, “Ten, fifteen years from now the world will be nothing like what we remember, nothing much like what we experience now. . . . We will be swimming in impulses and data””the microchip will make us offers that will be very hard to refuse.”

He must have had a crystal ball. In precisely the amount of time Birkerts predicted, I have gone from marveling at the novelty of e-mail to being simultaneously resentful of its hold on my life and unable to imagine how I would live without it.

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In July, Rice decided she had had enough. She announced her decision on her Facebook page:

“For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being ‘Christian’ or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.”

But, the decision wasn’t an easy one.

“It was very painful,” Rice tells NPR’s Michele Norris. “But I’ve always been public about my beliefs, and I’ve always been public about wanting to make a difference.”

“And frankly,” she continues, “after doing it, I felt sane for the first time in a very long while.”

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Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Communications Subcommittee, said Tuesday that he will introduce an online privacy bill that will create standards for how consumer data is collected and used for marketing. It will also give users more control over how their Internet activity and profiles are accessed by advertisers and Web sites.

Kerry’s bill, announced in a news release during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on consumer online privacy, comes after two privacy bills were introduced in the House in recent months that would protect sensitive information such as health and financial data unless expressly volunteered to be collected by users. Kerry said he hopes his bill will be passed at the beginning of the next Congress.

The legislative proposals add momentum to a push by consumer groups to create stronger federal rules for how companies such as Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google can track user activity and place ads based on that information. Facebook faced criticism for creating complex changes to its privacy polices late last year that made some information more available to the public. Apple and AT&T were criticized for a data breach that revealed the network identities of its iPad users. Google said it accidentally snooped on residential Wi-Fi networks around the world as it collected technical information for location-based applications.

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Pre-Facebook, the very phrase “social media consultant” would have produced only blank stares from the typical layman.

Now, people like Marcia Conner make their living advising companies on how to use Facebook and other social networking sites.

“The work I do focuses on helping organisations to use social technologies to connect the people in their organisations,” says Ms Conner, a partner in the Altimeter Group and author of the forthcoming book The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media.

“They are complementary technologies that can be used to get that same sort of community feeling.”

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Facebook, the social network service that started in a Harvard dorm room just six years ago, is growing at a dizzying rate around the globe, surging to nearly 500 million users, from 200 million users just 15 months ago.

It is pulling even with Orkut in India, where only a year ago, Orkut was more than twice as large as Facebook. In the last year, Facebook has grown eightfold, to eight million users, in Brazil, where Orkut has 28 million.

In country after country, Facebook is cementing itself as the leader and often displacing other social networks, much as it outflanked MySpace in the United States. In Britain, for example, Facebook made the formerly popular Bebo all but irrelevant, forcing AOL to sell the site at a huge loss two years after it bought it for $850 million. In Germany, Facebook surpassed StudiVZ, which until February was the dominant social network there.

With his typical self-confidence, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 26-year-old chief executive, recently said it was “almost guaranteed” that the company would reach a billion users.

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Internet users are complaining that the privacy settings on Facebook are confusing, and lawmakers are questioning Google about its gathering of e-mail and other personal data from Wi-Fi residential networks. The boundary between private and public information is becoming murkier every day, a blurring that is perhaps inevitable in the world of online surfing and social networking.

But how about religious communities? The boundaries are shifting there as well, because of a growing emphasis in congregations on honest and open sharing in small groups.

Vibrant churches today have Bible studies and support groups for every demographic, and congregational vitality is found in the relationships that develop among people in these groups. I am pushing my own church in this direction, after spending a sabbatical studying Christian hospitality while visiting congregations that are skilled at welcoming and including people.

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How many times in life must we engage in self-description? Let us count the ways: There’s the anxiety of college applications. The ignominy of Match.com dating. The embroidery of a C.V. sent to prospective employers. And, of course, there is Facebook.

The profile page of every Facebook acolyte has an enticing little Info tab, presenting the opportunity to demonstrate wit or wisdom, bravado or timidity, personal agenda or professional bona fides. A few categories are suggested by default ”” Likes and Dislikes, Favorite Quotations ”” but there’s a big yawning hole in the section labeled Bio. There’s no pull-down menu: the format is fill in the blank, every man for himself.

“It’s unnerving to sum yourself up and convey your personality,” said Gretchen Rubin, a former lawyer in New York and author of “The Happiness Project,” who opted for tongue-in-cheek: Red-haired, left-handed, legally blind, massive consumer of Diet Coke.

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Take a look.

Facebook has become one of the biggest influences on the lives of girls, according to a survey.

A study of eight to 15-year-olds for National Family Week found 40% of girls identified Facebook as one of the most important things in their lives – compared with 6% of boys.

Parents were found to underestimate the significance of technology.

The role of social networking was particularly important in families with a single mother as parent.

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It’s easy to lose your temper on the Internet. Anyone who reads ”” or writes ”” comments on blogs and news sites knows that the conversation can quickly stray from civil discourse to scathing personal attacks. For years, many websites just let users go at it, and free speech reigned. But now editors are rethinking just how open their sites should be.

Many people who want to participate in online discussions are quickly turned off by the nastiness. Miki Hsu Leavey, a resident of Napa, Calif., wrote a heartfelt, thankful letter to her local paper, The Napa Valley Register, after the health care bill passed. In the letter, she described her own struggle with lupus, her son’s difficulties getting insurance owing to his pre-existing heart condition, and her husband’s liver cancer diagnosis.

“My thank you note was really about the relief I had mentally,” says Leavey.

When Leavey looked at the site the morning her letter was published, she was shocked at many of the comments.

Read or listen to it all and, yes, let it serve as a salutary reminder about the comments here–KSH.

Responding to mounting pressure from users and privacy groups, Facebook introduced a new, simplified version of its privacy controls on Wednesday.

Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and chief executive, said the revised settings would make it easier for users to understand how much of their personal information was publicly accessible on the Web.

“The settings have gotten complex, and it has become hard for people to use them to effectively control their settings,” said Mr. Zuckerberg at a press event at Facebook headquarters. “We wanted to make it really easy to change privacy in just a couple of clicks.” Facebook said it would give its users a simple control to determine whether their information was visible to only friends, friends of friends or everyone on the Internet. Those settings will be applied retroactively to everything users have published on Facebook in the past.

In addition, Facebook said it was changing its directory of users to show only minimal information when people search for others, like the name, profile picture and gender. It had earlier required users to make more of their information public.

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Sometime in the next few weeks, Facebook will officially log its 500 millionth active citizen. If the website were granted terra firma, it would be the world’s third largest country by population, two-thirds bigger than the U.S. More than 1 in 4 people who browse the Internet not only have a Facebook account but have returned to the site within the past 30 days.

Just six years after Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg helped found Facebook in his dorm room as a way for Ivy League students to keep tabs on one another, the company has joined the ranks of the Web’s great superpowers. Microsoft made computers easy for everyone to use. Google helps us search out data. YouTube keeps us entertained. But Facebook has a huge advantage over those other sites: the emotional investment of its users. Facebook makes us smile, shudder, squeeze into photographs so we can see ourselves online later, fret when no one responds to our witty remarks, snicker over who got fat after high school, pause during weddings to update our relationship status to Married or codify a breakup by setting our status back to Single. (I’m glad we can still be friends, Elise.)

Getting to the point where so many of us are comfortable living so much of our life on Facebook represents a tremendous cultural shift, particularly since 28% of the site’s users are older than 34, Facebook’s fastest-growing demographic. Facebook has changed our social DNA, making us more accustomed to openness. But the site is premised on a contradiction: Facebook is rich in intimate opportunities ”” you can celebrate your niece’s first steps there and mourn the death of a close friend ”” but the company is making money because you are, on some level, broadcasting those moments online. The feelings you experience on Facebook are heartfelt; the data you’re providing feeds a bottom line.

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ERIN ROY: One day I came home from class, walked in my house, and my housemates were huddled around the computer, and they said that they had heard of and found this Web site. So I went over, checked it out and just saw terrible, terrible things written. Initially it definitely affected a lot of girls I know. I think they were just devastated, embarrassed, upset. Marist is a very small school, so one person hears something, and it spreads like wildfire even if it holds no truth.

[BETTY] ROLLIN: The Web site that was spreading the malicious gossip at Marist and 500 other colleges and universities was called JuicyCampus. Incredibly, the students had no way to stop it since the messages were all anonymously written, and the Web site was under no legal obligation to remove it.

ROY: Some of them definitely, probably were written by men who maybe left off on the wrong foot with a girl. Maybe something happened, and you know he didn’t think of her in the highest regards, and for girls””jealousy. They know this site is anonymous, so they are just so willing to jump on their computer and write comments about people, because they know they will never be caught….

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Follow up: There is more on this important subject there.

Some tech pundits think Facebook is in trouble, but the data tells a different story: growth hasn’t slowed a bit.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Facebook has a backlash on its hands. Many news outlets are reporting it, after all. Tech pundit Leo Laporte and Engadget co-founder Peter Rojas killed their profiles. U.S. Senators have sent the company a letter and so have a group of European Union data advisors. And in a flashy poker metaphor, blogger Jason Calcanis accused founder Mark Zuckerberg of overplaying his hand.

The data tells a different story: Facebook has had a net gain of 10 million active users since it announced a series of new features at f8, the company’s April 21st developer conference. A few high profile tech bloggers may have quit the site, but not many other people have. The number of deactivations, according to a Facebook spokesperson, is about the same as it’s been all along.

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Facebook claims it has 400 million users. But are they well-protected from prying eyes, scammers and unwanted marketers?

Not according to Joan Goodchild, senior editor of CSO (Chief Security Officer) Online.

She says your privacy may be at far greater risk of being violated than you know when you log onto Facebook, due to security gaffes or marketing efforts by the company.

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Carolyn Schapper was an Army sergeant who served in Iraq with a military intelligence unit north of Baghdad. Today, several years out of uniform, she keeps up with veterans online ”” on Facebook, blogs and chat groups.

Schapper taps on her computer at her kitchen table and pulls up a community on the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America site.

“They’ve got 11 people online now doing a chat,” she says of the nonprofit group. “So there are about seven different groups that didn’t exist three years ago that you can start communicating with people online.”

She says that veterans of today don’t go to American Legion halls or the VFW for a drink and a game of pool. They’ve created a virtual community.

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