July 2010

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. Though he did not say when it would reach that mark, the prediction was not greeted with the skepticism that had met his previous boasts of fast growth.

The federal government is launching an expansive program dubbed "Perfect Citizen" to detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants, according to people familiar with the program.

The surveillance by the National Security Agency, the government's chief eavesdropping agency, would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack, though it wouldn't persistently monitor the whole system, these people said. Defense contractor Raytheon Corp. recently won a classified contract for the initial phase of the surveillance effort valued at up to $100 million. Some industry and government officials familiar with the program see Perfect Citizen as an intrusion by the NSA into domestic affairs, while others say it is an important program to combat an emerging security threat that only the NSA is equipped to provide.

[Commentary] It is tempting to believe that smartphones will follow personal computers into a winner-takes-all world, in which a Windows equivalent crushes the opposition through sheer ubiquity and business leverage. There are many people waiting for Steve Jobs of Apple to repeat his earlier mistake - creating a ground-breaking product but then getting stuck in a small niche. But Gapper doesn't believe that will happen; more likely is a continually shifting dynamic in which Apple's iPhone grapples with BlackBerries, Android phones, Symbian phones, maybe even Palm phones, for temporary dominance. Winner will not take all because the dynamics of mobile competition differ from the desktop battles in crucial respects.

So why are we not heading for a winner-takes-all world? First, Apple is better positioned. Second, there is no entrenchment mechanism in smartphones as strong as the one that existed in personal computers. Last, the gatekeepers in the mobile world - operators that subsidise and sell handsets - have a vested interest in diversity.

The Drive Coalition, an effort by lobbyists to reframe the debate about distracted driving, has crashed and burned. The coalition was the brainchild of a Washington firm called the Seward Square Group. The idea was to rally support for mobile device makers, car companies and others to fight state laws aimed at prohibiting motorists from talking and texting while driving. Instead, the lobbying group wanted to push the idea of broader laws that would focus on car distractions in general ­ caused by anything from talking on phones to eating hamburgers or fiddling with the radio. But the lobbying effort provoked the ire of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. He held a press conference on July 7 decrying an effort he said was a threat to driver safety. Soon after the press conference, the lobbying group announced it was pulling the plug on the coalition.