Cody Taylor

No one knows just where Facebook is heading with its platform or whether it’s serious about crushing novel new social networking services like Twitter or FriendFeed.

Despite reports that the Internet-enabled Macs at Apple’s retail stores aren’t allowing customers to log on to Facebook, Apple says it doesn’t limit access to the popular social-networking site.

There have been numerous ‘revolts’ on Digg (social news), hundreds of thousands of users have created numerous groups to stage protests on Facebook (social networking), and hundreds of blog posts have been written about how terrible Twitter’s service and up-time used to be and what a poor job they were doing in communicating their problems ..

We had thought Google was all about frugality and focus now: In recent months, the search giant has been killing off failed experiments like Twitter-rival Jaiku, mobile social networking service Dodgeball and virtual world Lively.

The New York Times Magazine is running a story about the rise in political activism in Egypt through sites like Facebook, which allow citizens to gather and share ideas in ways they otherwise aren’t allowed. A state-of-emergency law has been active in Egypt since 1981, which, among other things, “allows the government to ban political organizations and makes it illegal for more than five people to gather without a license from the government.” As affordable internet access has spread throughout the country, the government is having a much harder time keeping wraps on the ideas of dissidents. Blocking access to the sites isn’t a good solution for the government, because many non-dissidents use it for mundane communications. As Harvard’s Ethan Zuckerman puts it, “…doing so would alert a large group of people who they can’t afford to radicalize.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gamasutra is running an in-depth look at the regulation of video games in the US and other countries. They discuss the reasons for such legislation, such as child protection and intellectual property restrictions, as well as what gamers can expect to see in the coming years. “Fairfield also points out combinations of laws, which, when put together make for strange outcomes. The biggest of these, for video games, is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In short, gaining unauthorized access to someone’s computer and doing 0 in damages opens you up for criminal charges. It’s good for prosecuting hackers, but it makes for a strange fit with social networking websites and user-generated content. That fit was especially strange when prosecutors weren’t quite sure how to approach the widely publicized case of Megan Meier. The 13-year-old Meier committed suicide after being deceived and bullied by another girl and her mother, Lori Drew. Unable to find a good way to approach the issue, prosecutors charged Drew under MySpace’s End User License Agreement, effectively giving MySpace the power to dictate criminal law.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.