Your Facebook Friends Are Watching You—Did We Just Move Closer to 1984? George Orwell’s novel 1984 begins with Winston Smith, the main character, seeing posters saying BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.  In 2010, that could be replaced with FACEBOOK IS WATCHING YOU.  Or rather, YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK ARE WATCHING YOU.  You and your friends can now post where you are and share this information, if you

Foursquare Has Been Trying (And Failing) To Trademark "Check-In" You’d be hard-pressed to find a hotter term in technology right now than “check-in.” Following Facebook’s entry into the location space with Places, it will soon be a term that hundreds of million of web users know well. But millions already do know it well thanks to Foursquare. While it seems likely that they weren’t the first to us

As we noted nearly a month ago now, Facebook has acquired social activity and ‘check-in’ service provider Hot Potato for about $10 million in cash. Facebook, fresh from announcing its entry into the location game (our ongoing coverage), and Hot Potato this morning confirmed the acquisition, which is clearly a move by the social networking juggernaut to bring in more talent rather than expanding it

It’s a lot like the Cold War – most of the really interesting fights among startup investors – and there are lots of them – occur behind the scenes. Publicly everyone gets along just great. But declining returns, too much capital and the disruptive force of a new breed of angel investors has created enough tension in the system that some frustrations are beginning to boil over. And in some cases,

Disqus Rolls Out Improved Global Profiles, Community Box, And More Online comment platform Disqus, which lets you use a single profile across some 500,000 sites across the web, is launching some key new social features today. The first change concerns Disqus’s global user profiles, which let you get an at-a-glance view of a user’s recent comments. These are good for figuring out who someone is and

Enterprise Startups Or Behemoths: Which Are We Going To Bet On? I knew I would be touching a raw nerve with my last two posts, on patents. But I was really surprised at the divergence of opinion. Entrepreneurs overwhelmingly supported my stance that software patents hamper innovation and need to be abolished, but friends at Microsoft, IBM, and Google were outraged at my recommendation. The big com