Awesm developer Jeremiah Cohick posted the following Facebook status earlier today, postulating that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is too busy wheeling and dealing to actually use Facebook, “In the same way drug dealers don’t use the product they sell, I doubt Zuckerberg is on Facebook all day. Visionaries don’t idle online.”

Well, the proof is in the pudding as they say; From what it looks like, Zuckerberg immediately replied to Cohick’s status update, “No, I really do use Facebook all day long.”

Perfect.

Thus far 1,732 people have liked Zuckerberg’s response, 243 have liked Cohick’s original comment and 32 people have shared the exchange mostly because it humanizes Zuck, bringing him down to our level. I mean, if he was trolling Facebook enough to see that random person’s comment in the first place then he probably does spend a lot of time on the service.

In my humble experience, Internet visionaries do spend massive amounts of time online, because having a deep and continually updating understanding of how people communicate and interact here sparks the visionary process. Besides, that drug dealer thing is mostly an urban myth anyways.

Via: Truthful Tech

It’s been less than two years since Facebook moved into its 150,000 square foot office space at 1601 South California Ave in Palo Alto, but the rapidly growing company is already itching for a new home. Now we’re hearing from multiple sources that Facebook has chosen the site for its new headquarters: the former Sun Microsystems/Oracle campus in Menlo Park CA, just off the Bayfront Expressway at 1601 Willow Road (map). The campus is around six miles from Facebook’s current home, and is bordered by Menlo Park and East Palo Alto.

The move doesn’t come as a surprise. Facebook had practically outgrown its current offices on S. California Ave before it even moved in, and it’s already subleased additional space at 1050 Page Mill Road, just down the street from its current location (employees can take shuttles between the two buildings, but it’s not very convenient). With over 2,000 employees and no signs of slowing, the company needs a lot more leg room.

Facebook says it isn’t a done deal quite yet (actually, they wouldn’t even confirm the location they’re looking at):

“We are exploring options for a long-term location to fit our growing business needs. We are in the due diligence phase on one potential site, but it would be premature to offer any specifics. We hope to have more to share in the near future once things have been finalized.”

Prior to moving to its current home on S. California Ave, Facebook occupied a handful of buildings that littered downtown Palo Alto near University Avenue.  It’s unclear if this new location would become Facebook’s long-term home, or if Facebook intends to move once again in a few years. Back in 2003 Google had similar rapid growing pains and began subleasing SGI’s office space in Mountain View — it later purchased this land and expanded after its IPO.

Image via Dianiel Rosenthal’s Sun blog

Instead of another boring lecture, last week my students at UC-Berkeley got quite a treat: a lively discussion with TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington. I once described Mike as a cross between Oprah Winfrey and Howard Stern; so I was ready for a little controversy. But he ended up lighting such a big fire, that I’ve been bombarded with questions from students about their education and careers. The questions aren’t just coming from Berkeley; after the discussion was posted on TechCrunch, students at Duke asked me to discuss this at a keynote I am giving at their entrepreneurship symposium on Wednesday; and students at other schools, from as far as India and Singapore, have asked for advice.  So I’ll just respond here in the hope of quenching this fire.

At the UC-Berkeley Distinguished Innovator Lecture Series, this week, Mike and I discussed a variety of topics.  We agreed on most subjects—except on the importance of education (and dearth of women in tech—which is a battle I’ll fight another day). When I brought up my TechCrunch post on the importance of MBA degrees, Arrington questioned why students needed to get any degree or go to college at all.  He talked up the success of tech CEOs who had dropped out of college—Zuckerberg, Gates, and “countless high-profile entrepreneurs including Larry and Sergey” (Mike: Larry and Sergey both have undergraduate degrees and were completing PhD’s). Despite being interrupted by Berkeley professor Ikhlaq Sidhu (who I was afraid would come on stage and strangle Mike before he could finish his sentence), Arrington said that he didn’t learn much from college; gaining admittance to a Berkeley or Harvard is the only certification a student needs; dropping out from college doesn’t carry a stigma anymore; so “the best thing in the world is to go to Harvard for a year and drop out because everyone knows you were smart enough to get in”.

Arrington told students that the kind of person who wants to increase his chances of success by getting a masters degree isn’t an entrepreneur; older entrepreneurs have no chance of raising money (so they’re a lost cause); success means building a billion dollar business and making a lot of money—it’s not good enough to build a good lifestyle business that pays the bills and brings you happiness. So they should “ready-fire-aim” and go for the big prize rather than thinking small.

Here is the problem with Arrington’s logic: students may come up with great ideas and start a company, but they aren’t going to be able make it big unless they have the educational foundation. Maybe Zuckerberg lucked out by being at the right place at the right time, but he wasn’t born with the knowledge of how to grow a business. To build a business, you need to understand subjects like finance, marketing, intellectual property and corporate law. Until you have been in the business world for a while, you don’t know how to negotiate contracts, deal with people, manage and nurture employees, and sell to customers. Most importantly, if students don’t learn the importance of finishing what they start, they will never achieve success—this requires perseverance and determination.  And by dropping out of college, they won’t have the alumni networks that they need to help them later in their careers and in business.

The harsh reality is that for every Zuckerberg, there are a thousand who drop out of college and fail. Many get discouraged after their failures and move to other professions which require less skill and education. Some universities do readmit students who dropped out for a short period of time, but most students end up burning through their savings and loans from friends and relatives, and can no longer afford their education. Some give up and look for jobs in big companies, but big companies don’t generally hire people without degrees—because they want employees who have the discipline to finish what they start; who won’t jump ship and chase every rainbow.

Plus, if you look at the backgrounds of the people who actually built Facebook—the executives and employees of the company—you’ll find that they aren’t college dropouts; they are highly educated. Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple—all started by college dropouts are the most selective in hiring; they are the most fussy about degrees.

My advice to students is to get all the education they can, while they can. Complete at least a bachelors and get a masters degree if you can. The degree doesn’t have to be from an elite college like Harvard or Stanford; any education will carry you far. As this chart shows (based on an analysis of the backgrounds of the founders of 652 successful technology companies), there is a huge difference in the size and revenue of companies founded by people with college degrees. But there is only a small difference between those with ivy-league degrees and the average (which includes all startups).

After you graduate, you should gain some practical work experience and learn the realities of the business world before making the plunge into entrepreneurship. Work for a big company for a few years; learn about how the corporate world works; get good at people management, project planning, and teamwork. Then join a startup—which will probably fail as most startups do. But you get to fail on someone else’s dime and learn all the valuable lessons.

In his talk, Mike Arrington said that he got little from his education.  He also said that he wished he had gotten an MBA instead of a law degree.  But what Mike didn’t seem to acknowledge was that he needed the law degree to become a lawyer; when he was a lawyer, he gained an in-depth knowledge about the tech world and its problems —which led to his startups; and this education gave him the knowledge to take on unethical companies and question unethical practices—all of which have helped make TechCrunch the world’s leading tech blog. Does anyone think that Mike would have been able to build TechCrunch if he was a college dropout?

In our discussion, Mike joked that instead of doing the law degree, he wishes he had learned to play the guitar in junior high—“maybe he would have become a rock star”. I have no idea if Mike has any musical talent, but a smaller proportion of guitarists become rock stars than techies who become CEOs.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa  is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwaand find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

I’m at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, where the social network is having a special press event to talk about the current social gaming landscape. We expect there to be some important announcements this evening — the event is being led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and there are myriad game developers in attendance. My live notes and a video stream are below.

Facebook’s Dan Rose has taken the stage.
Talking about changes to FB platform, user experience around games.

• Mark Zuckerberg has taken the stage. Today, talking about two themes: quality and apps/games. Every day almost 300 million people come to FB.com.
• Hundreds of millions of people love games on Facebook. Hundreds of millions hate them.
CrunchBase Information
Facebook
Information provided by CrunchBase

The term “social network” is of course synonymous with online networks like Facebook. But think about what you’re actual social life is like for a second. Are you really closest to the people whose items you “like” the most on Facebook? What about the people you @reply or retweet on Twitter? The people you reblog the most on Tumblr? If you’re anything like me, probably not. Instead, the best indicator of who I actually interact with socially the most in real life are the calls I make and the texts I send — it’s all mobile interaction.

I’ve written before that I think location is the bridge between social networks and actual social life. But why do we even need that bridge? Why are so many startups content to build on top of the Facebook or Twitter social graph, when a lot of them can access your actual social graph in your mobile contact book? We’re seeing more and more apps go “mobile first, web second” these days, and that’s likely to increase going forward. This means that they start as services on mobile devices. So again I ask, why not just get to your actual social graph through your contacts there?

Sure, many do that to some extent already. APIs for Android and the iPhone give you access to contact list information to varying degrees. But most startups are still approaching that idea as a secondary tactic after they’ve hooked in your social graph through Facebook or Twitter. But I think we may start to see some that go right to the heart of your contacts on your mobile device. In fact, I met with one in the making last week, Addappt.

While they’re still building out the product, the core idea of Addappt is to connect people through their contact lists (in this case, on the iPhone). Specifically, their app scours your contact list to see which of your friends are signed up to go to various upcoming conferences. But you can easily see this concept transferred to any number of social utilities. “When was the last time the address book saw any innovation?,” is the way co-founder Mrinal Desai puts it. And he’s right.

It seems that companies like Apple and Google are sitting on a treasure trove of actual social data with these contact lists. Calls, texts, emails, it’s all right there. Google obviously has tried (and failed) to build a social graph through your email contacts before — but they went about it wrong, and they did so on the desktop. Mobile is the key to this.

Currently, we’re also seeing Apple also struggle in its first real attempt at social networking, with iTunes Ping. Their network is way too closed to be of much use — but at least they get that mobile should be a component of it.

But imagine if Apple built social tools right into your Contacts app? Maybe it would start with short status updates (maybe this would even pull in tweets), and then it would move to something like instant messaging. Then imagine if they did something with location? All of this would be opt-in, of course, but it could be very powerful.

And think about FaceTime. It’s an amazing product, but it’s far too hard to use because you never know when someone else is available to chat. Apple won’t accept the FacePlant app which solves this, so I have to believe they’re working on their own solution. The Contact app would be perfect for this. You load it up and see who is available to FaceTime.

Obviously, using your mobile contact book isn’t ideal for all types of social applications. But for the ones you want to use with just your closest friends: location, photos, short messages, events — it could be a killer set of data.

Remember Diaspora? You’ll be forgiven if you don’t. Since they received a lot of hype as the open-source “Facebook Alternative” this past May, they’ve been quiet. In fact, they hadn’t given any updates on their progress since early July. But today they’ve re-emerged with some updates. Notably, they say: “We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th.” That’s just three weeks away.

That’s good news. But even though it has only been three months since the initial buzz began about the project, the online world has slightly changed. Back then, it seemed as if everyone with a voice on the web was screaming bloody murder about Facebook and their privacy issues. That plus a timely New York Times profile helped Diaspora raise over $200,000 from the crowd-sourced fundraising site Kickstarter — the most ever raised on the site and an amazing $190,000 more than Diaspora’s original goal. But today, again, just three months later, Facebook is still growing like a weed. Controversy keeps bubbling up, but it just as quickly subsides.

We all forgot to quit.

And so the question remains: will a project like Diaspora be able to get any traction given Facebook’s 500 million person head start?

At the very least, Diaspora is being realistic about what they can and cannot do. In the post today they’ve noted that they have for now scrapped the idea of plugins and APIs in favor of “simple and high value features.” I like the sound of that.

Further, they write:

We are spending a good chunk of time concentrating on building clear, contextual sharing. That means an intuitive way for users to decide, and not notice deciding, what content goes to their coworkers and what goes to their drinking buddies. We know that’s a hard UI problem and we take it seriously.

And while the open-sourcing of the project begins on September 15, they won’t be done working on it. Two of the members of the core four-person team are taking a leave from their studies at NYU (this was a Summer project for all of them) and the work will continue long-term.

Meanwhile, the team notes that it is time for some R&R, as three of them will be attending the Burning Man festival in California. Presumably, those pictures will only be shared with their “drinking buddies” list in Diaspora.

Yesterday during their Places event, Facebook showed a video highlighting the thoughts of the team of developers who actually built the functionality. It’s slick as hell — very nicely done. In fact, we weren’t the only ones who initially thought that it looked like an Apple video.

No it’s not quite the FaceTime Don Draper-esque commercial, but it’s much better than a lot of the very bland videos that most other companies put out there to talk about their products.

The correct way to do these things either seems to be to go for humorous/hipster (like Square) or sentimental/simple (like Apple). With their Places video, Facebook actually sort of combined the two — it’s the ultimate sentimental/hipster video.

As I said, it’s very good. Watch it for yourself below. My favorite parts are the bits where the iPhone is searching for service — welcome to life in the Bay Area with AT&T.

Security specialist Ron Bowes has once again proven how easy it is to glean valuable user information from Facebook, by spidering Facebook’s online directory and compiling it all into one neat little torrent that could be downloaded off his site, SkullSecurity.com.

Bowes created a torrent containing over 171 million entries with links to profiles that provide access to the names, addresses and phone numbers of 100 million users, one fifth of Facebook.  Bowes accessed Facebook’s directory, which has the default dictum “Anyone can opt out of appearing here by changing their Search privacy settings.” Yeah, but should they have to?

These kinds of security breaches will only encourage more hackers desperate for attention. Now would be a good time for Facebook to set their default search to “Friends Only.” Why? Because most people are aren’t quite aware that check mark next to “Everyone” includes a hacker who can grab your personal info, package it up and sell it to the highest bidder.

According to Bowes the torrent contains (at 2.8 GB, our torrent is “still downloading”) …

• The URL of every searchable Facebook user’s profile.
• The name of every searchable Facebook user, both unique and by count (perfect for post-processing, datamining, etc).
• Processed lists, including first names with count, last names with count, potential usernames with count, etc.
• The programs [Bowes] used to generate everything [which makes it easy for other hackers to replicate the process]

While the advice to an individual user to change your privacy settings may be moot at this point, the suggestion that Facebook make it profiles unindexable by default isn’t. Especially when you read the more ominous statement from Bowes further on in his post on the breach, “So far, I have only indexed the searchable users, not their friends … I’d like to tackle that in the future.”

Photo: Bejealousofme/Flickr

There was a time when Facebook was at the forefront of mobile app development. Before there was even an App Store, the web app Facebook put out that was optimized for the iPhone was brilliant. Then the App Store came and with it was a great Facebook native app. Then came version 3 of the app, which was even better. Those days, sadly, are long over.

Everyone already knows that the Facebook Android app sucks. The iPhone app, though, thanks largely to version 3, has remained a bright spot. But while some people are gushing today over the latest iPhone update (3.1.3, the first update in a while), I’m not one of those people.

First of all, Facebook still has yet to release a native iPad app. This is pretty ridiculous considering that undoubtedly a high percentage of the millions of iPad owners have searched the App Store for a Facebook app, and come away with only imitations (which Facebook has demanded be taken down). As I noted above, the original Facebook app for iPhone launched alongside the App Store itself. We’re now almost 3 months post-iPad launch, and there is absolutely no word about when we can expect an iPad app.

Second, while many of the best iPhone app developers have been hustling to get their apps iOS 4-ready (the new iPhone OS launching on Monday), and plenty already have iOS 4 apps in the App Store, this update brings nothing in that department from Facebook. They couldn’t even bother to turn on fast app switching (the most basic iOS 4 multitasking feature) if they were going to update their app anyway?

Third, this update has at least one glaring UI bug. Sure, bugs are a part of the game, but how Facebook overlooked this one is dumbfounding. If you have new messages or friend requests on Facebook, load up the main screen in the app. There you’ll find certain areas badged to let you know there are updates for you to see — but these badges have a dark upper area that clashes badly with the light background of the main screen. I mean, it just looks awful. How did that get through quality control?

Meanwhile, as I said, plenty of folks are gushing over the things Facebook did add with this update. The ability (finally) to be able to see and write on event walls is definitely nice. But the big addition is the ability to view videos in the app. The only problem? It’s really hard to actually find any videos to view. While Facebook has an area on everyone’s profile for pictures, videos are nowhere to be found. You’d think if they were going to do a video-centric update to the app, they’d make a new area for these videos to highlight the feature they added — but no.

So you’ll forgive me if I let out a big sigh upon seeing this Facebook update. Ever since developer Joe Hewitt walked away from the project (over his disgust for some App Store policies) last November, things have gone downhill. And that trend, sadly, continues — even though Facebook promised it wouldn’t. Small updates may be fine or even welcomed by other companies — but Facebook used to lead the way in iPhone development. Now they’re second-rate.

There are some 55 million monthly active users of Facebook for iPhone, according to Inside Facebook. They deserve more commitment to this platform (as do the Facebook Android users).

Find the updated iPhone app here.

Next week, the Commonwealth Club will be holding a special ‘double feature’ event that will include our own Michael Arrington interviewing David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, with an introduction by Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff. And it’s a double feature: following the Arrington/Kirkpatrick interview, there will be a second conversation asking if ‘Google is Making Us Stupid’, featuring Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research, and author Nicholas Carr, with an introduction from Josh McHugh.

Want to go? We’ve got four free tickets to give away.

If you want a shot at one, click the handy ‘Like’ buttons below to become fans of TechCrunch and The Facebook Effect, then leave us a comment below saying why you want to go. Feel free to suggest questions for Michael to ask David (though obviously he’ll ultimately ask what he wants).

The event will take place in San Francisco on June 23, with check-in starting at 5:15 PM. For full details (or if you want to buy tickets), check out this page.

We’ll pick the winners tomorrow at 5 PM — make sure to use a valid Email address (or Facebook Connect) for your comment so we can contact you should you win.