Bill Gates gets a Twitter account and tons of followers overnight (about 150.000 in the first 15 hours) as you can read in more details here. The impact of Twitter and its relevant continue to be fascinating. 

Maybe this is causing too much traffic <g>, as the service is currently down, "something is techically wrong". So I'm not sure if this post will ever show up there!

No, Facebook is not making an IPO (a public offer of its shares), they are making a lot of your information more visible to the outside of your friends circle. The new changes in privacy settings (vaguely labelled as new privacy settings) will make most of your data previously visible only to friends, available to the friends of your friends (which looks mild but is an exponential growth) and to the public (that is any of the half a billion Facebook users and even beyond that, as it should up in the public web profile.

Of course, you are invited to change these settings, but the way the page is phrased is very ambiguous. Picking "new setting" is hardly explicative, although as you hover over the corresponding radio button you'll see the permission you are granting. Clearly, Facebook wants to absorb Twitter. But most Facebook users tend to consider their post, pictures, shared videos "for their friends" and not for public consumption. This is a change taht will see a lot of resistance for sure.

Some more info on John Battelle blog at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JohnBattellesSearchblog/~3/wBGLwuvJQeY/005072.php and on the Facebook blog post explaining the change.

An interesting blog post on how and when to use Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites for marketing purposes

http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/the-world/article/how-to-use-social-media-guy-kawasaki

Very interesting reading... and a reference to what seems a very interesting book.

Twitter updates its terms of service, making them nicers to users, imho. The gain rights to distribute your content, but they state very clearly that the content belongs to you, not to them. They retain the rights to add advertising, cut on spam, and make the content available to third parties via their API.

You can read more info at this blog entry: http://blog.twitter.com/2009/09/twitters-new-terms-of-service.html. You can also read the full TOS document at: http://twitter.com/tos.

How did I realize? Thanks to a nice email send to all Twitter users by Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder:

We'd like to let you know about our new Terms of Service. As Twitter
has evolved, we've gained a better understanding of how folks use the
service. As a result, we've updated the Terms and we're notifying
account holders.

We've posted a brief overview on our company blog and you can read the
Terms of Service online. If you haven't been by in a while, we invite
you to visit Twitter to see what else is new.

Overview: http://blog.twitter.com
Terms: http://www.twitter.com/tos
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com

These updates complement the spirit of Twitter. If the nature of our
service changes, we'll revisit the Terms as necessary. Comments are
welcome, please find the "feedback" link on the Terms of Service page.

Thanks,
Biz Stone, Co-founder
Twitter, Inc.

I've found (thanks a a twitter post by Michele Costabile) a very nice article by Marshall Kirkpatrick covering the effects of recent troubles of some social networks (like Twitter), acquisitions of others (FriendFeed), and the overall evolution of the social networks. The post is at www.readwriteweb.com/archives/is_a_perfect_storm_forming_for_distributed_social_networking.php. 

I have to say that with social networks asking for full ownership of the contents you post, disabling accounts they feel illegittimate, and not providing enough confidence in being always online, it would make sense to build the "social" nature of the Web by aggregating separate sites, rather than letting one site own the content. We'll see.

Twitter has made available an interesting business guide to its own service, with case studies and examples. You can find it online at http://business.twitter.com/twitter101.

I find it very interesting and revealing of the current trends.

How Facebook and the like changed the meaning of the word "Social"? This cartoon on "the Facebook generation" as the first "Post-Of-The-Wall generation" is quite nice...

Facebook will make available readable usernames (rather than IDs) starting on Saturday on a first-come first-served basis. The description of the new feature is in the Facebook Official Blog, "Coming Soon: Facebook Usernames".

The usernames countdown site is at: http://www.facebook.com/username/. The feature will become available "Starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13", that is 6 am European site. The countdown page will show the time at your current location.

Interesting summary of Google I/O conference: The Web has won. The article is by David Needle is on Internet News.

On the same line, Tim O'Reilly report from the same conference pushes the idea that HTML5 will push the adoption of the web platform even more: Google Bets Big on HTML5.

As this article on Twitter Growth on TechCrunch shows, according to ComScore in the month of may Twitter has surpassed the web visits of Digg, LinkedIn, and NYTimes.com. ComScore estimates Twitter at 32 million global visitors, which is impressive considering how many people use the service with a multitude of clients (including phones) and don't use the web site itself. This is the ComScore graph: 

Checking out on Alexa top site ranking, Twitter holds the 37th place as of today, but half of the places above it are taken by various Google properties (including national Google landing pages). Alexa rates Twitter at a 280% increase over the last 3 months: