Hearst exec Kenneth Bronfin says that e-readers "will be a big part of our future."

Hearst to launch a wireless e-reader
The publisher plans to introduce a large-format device this year based on electronic-ink technology.

Last Updated: February 27, 2009: 12:08 PM ET
Hearst exec Kenneth Bronfin says that e-readers "will be a big part of our future."

cnnadNEW YORK (Fortune) -- Against a backdrop of plummeting ad revenue for newspapers and magazines, and rising costs for paper and delivery, Hearst Corp., is getting set to launch an electronic reader that it hopes can do for periodicals what Amazon's Kindle is doing for books.
According to industry insiders, Hearst, which publishes magazines ranging from Cosmopolitan to Esquire and newspapers including the financially imperiled San Francisco Chronicle, has developed a wireless e-reader with a large-format screen suited to the reading and advertising requirements of newspapers and magazines. The device and underlying technology, which other publishers will be allowed to adapt, is likely to debut this year.
So-called e-readers like Kindle and the Sony Reader are hand-held gadgets that use electronic "ink" displayed on a crisp, low-power screen to deliver an experience that approximates reading on paper - without the cost of paper, printing and delivery, which can account for as much as 50% of the cost of putting out a periodical.
Hearst executives declined to provide specifics about the forthcoming e-reader, but Kenneth Bronfin, who heads up the interactive media group for Hearst, told Fortune in an interview for a forthcoming magazine story that the publishing company has a deep expertise in the technology. "I can't tell you the details of what we are doing, but I can say we are keenly interested in this, and expect these devices will be a big part of our future," Bronfin told Fortune.
Bronfin led an investment by Hearst more than a decade ago in E Ink, a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup spun out of research at MIT, that supplies the electronic-ink technology used in the vast majority of e-readers on the market today, including Amazon's Kindle, devices from Sony and a crop of next-generation products set to launch in the next 12 to 18 months.
With print revenue in decline and online revenue unable to fill the gap, the $300 billion global publishing industry is increasingly looking to devices like e-readers to lower costs while preserving the business model that has sustained newspapers and magazines.
Insiders familiar with the Hearst device say it has been designed with the needs of publishers in mind. That includes its form, which will approximate the size of a standard sheet of paper, rather than the six-inch diagonal screen found on Kindle, for example. The larger screen better approximates the reading experience of print periodicals, as well as giving advertisers the space and attention they require.
Given the evolving state of the technology, the Hearst reader is likely to debut in black and white and later transition to high-resolution color with the option for video as those displays, now in testing phases, get commercialized. Downloading content from participating newspapers and magazines will occur wirelessly. For durability, the device is likely to have a flexible core, perhaps even foldable, rather than the brittle glass substrates used in readers on the market today.
What Hearst and its partners plan to do is sell the e-readers to publishers and to take a cut of the revenue derived from selling magazines and newspapers on these devices. The company will, however, leave it to the publishers to develop their own branding and payment models. "That's something you will never see Amazon do," someone familiar with the Hearst project said. "They aren't going to give up control of the devices."
The question now is, will readers give up their newspapers and magazines for these new readers?

(CNN) -- In keeping with the democratic nature of user-generated media, Facebook is inviting its 150 million users to help decide how the online gathering place is run.

Facebook is inviting its 150 million users to help decide how the social-networking site is run.

A week after a policy-change blunder sparked widespread protests, the Web's most popular social-networking site announced a new approach Thursday to give users more control over future Facebook rules and practices.
Site managers published the Facebook Principles, a set of 10 values they hope will make Facebook more transparent, along with a proposed statement of rights and responsibilities governing privacy, content ownership and other issues. Users will be able to comment and vote on the wording of the documents.
"As people share more information on services like Facebook, a new relationship is created between Internet companies and the people they serve," Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, said in a statement. "The past week reminded us that users feel a real sense of ownership over Facebook itself, not just the information they share."
Facebook became caught in a content-rights battle after revealing this month that it was granting itself permanent rights to users' photos, wall posts and other information, even after a user closed an account. Member backlash was swift and severe, as tens of thousands of angry users either canceled their accounts or created online petitions.
To quell the uprising, Facebook hastily announced last week it was reverting to its old terms of use policy on member information "while we resolve the issues that people have raised."
Don't Miss
Facebook backs down, reverses on user data policy
Facebook faces furor over content rights
Thursday's announcement seemed aimed at further reassuring users that they, not Facebook, will retain rights to their postings.
"You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, including information about you and the actions you take," reads the proposed statement of rights and responsibilities, which condenses almost 40 pages of legal jargon into fewer than six pages.
Facebook said Thursday it will continue to make independent decisions about the timing and rollout of products. But users will now help determine future changes to Facebook policies through online voting.
Over the next month, the fast-growing site will host virtual "Town Halls" to collect user comments on the proposed new principles and statement of rights and responsibilities.
As of Friday morning, more than 8,600 users had joined a Facebook group to solicit feedback regarding the proposed Facebook Principles, while more than 7,800 had joined a group that was set up to review the proposed statement of rights and responsibilities.
Facebook says that after the comment period ends March 29, it will review users' submissions, then republish its policies to incorporate feedback. All future policy changes would be subject to similar notice and comment periods.
Facebook also plans to establish a user council to participate more closely in the development of future policies and practices.
"Companies like ours need to develop new models of governance," Zuckerberg added. "Rather than simply reissue a new Terms of Use, the changes we're announcing today are designed to open up Facebook so that users can participate meaningfully in our policies and our future." iReport.com: iReporter feels like a 'citizen of Facebook' now
Initial reaction to Facebook's more open approach appeared to be positive.
"The idea that a major company like Facebook would give its users a vote in how the service is governed is remarkable," user Julius Harper, co-founding administrator of the People Against the new Terms of Service group, said in a statement posted on Facebook. "This decision should go far in restoring people's trust, and I hope it sets a precedent for other online services to follow."
But other members had concerns about section 2.3 of the proposed statement of rights and responsibilities, which states that users will grant Facebook license "to use, copy, publicly perform or display, distribute, modify, translate, and create derivative works of ... any content you post" until a member deletes the content or closes an account.
"This is precisely why I pulled one of my photos and why I'm now considering the deletion of my account," Bertha Chambers of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, wrote in a Facebook post Thursday afternoon.
"If Facebook wants to make money through advertising ... that's fine with me. BUT, I'm not giving Facebook permission to use my words or my art for their profit or in ways or reasons that I might not personally support

The Tech Lab: Bruce Schneier

Bruce Schneier is the chief security technology officer at BT and a celebrated writer and speaker on privacy, cryptography and security issues.
Welcome to the future, where everything about you is saved. A future where your actions are recorded, your movements are tracked, and your conversations are no longer ephemeral. A future brought to you not by some 1984-like dystopia, but by the natural tendencies of computers to produce data.
Data is the pollution of the information age. It's a natural byproduct of every computer-mediated interaction. It stays around forever, unless it's disposed of. It is valuable when reused, but it must be done carefully. Otherwise, its after effects are toxic.
And just as 100 years ago people ignored pollution in our rush to build the Industrial Age, today we're ignoring data in our rush to build the Information Age.
Increasingly, you leave a trail of digital footprints throughout your day. Once you walked into a bookstore and bought a book with cash. Now you visit Amazon, and all of your browsing and purchases are recorded. You used to buy a train ticket with coins; now your electronic fare card is tied to your bank account. Your store affinity cards give you discounts; merchants use the data on them to reveal detailed purchasing patterns.

Bruce Schneier has written widely on security, privacy and technology.Data about you is collected when you make a phone call, send an e-mail message, use a credit card, or visit a website. A card will only exacerbate this.
More computerized systems are watching youare ubiquitous in some cities, and eventually face recognition technology will be able to identify individuals. Automatic license plate scanners track vehicles in parking lots and cities. Color printers, digital cameras, and some photocopy machines have embedded identification codes. Aerial surveillance is used by cities to find building permit violators and by marketers to learn about home and garden size.
As become more common, they'll be tracked, too. Already you can be , even if you never make a call. This ; not "follow that car," but "follow every car".
Computers are mediating conversation as well. Face-to-face conversations are ephemeral. Years ago, telephone companies might have known who you called and how long you talked, but not what you said. Today you chat in e-mail, by text message, and on social networking sites. You blog and you Twitter. These conversations - with family, friends, and colleagues - can be recorded and stored.
It used to be too expensive to save this data, but computer memory is now cheaper. Computer processing power is cheaper, too; more data is cross-indexed and correlated, and then used for secondary purposes. What was once ephemeral is now permanent.
Who collects and uses this data depends on local laws. In the US, corporations collect, then buy and sell, much of this information for marketing purposes. In Europe, governments collect more of it than corporations. On both continents, law enforcement wants access to as much of it as possible for both investigation and data mining.

More and more people are scattering their personal data onlineRegardless of country, more organizations are collecting, storing, and sharing more of it.
More is coming. Keyboard logging programs and devices can already record everything you type; recording everything you say on your cell phone is only a few years away.
A "life recorder" you can clip to your lapel that'll record everything you see and hear isn't far behind. It'll be sold as a security device, so that no one can attack you without being recorded. When that happens, will not wearing a life recorder be used as evidence that someone is up to no good, just as prosecutors today use the fact that someone left his cell phone at home as evidence that he didn't want to be tracked?
You're living in a unique time in history: the technology is here, but it's not yet seamless. Identification checks are common, but you still have to show your ID. Soon it'll happen automatically, either by remotely querying a chip in your wallets or by recognizing your face on camera.
And all those cameras, now visible, will shrink to the point where you won't even see them. Ephemeral conversation will all but disappear, and you'll think it normal. Already your children live much more of their lives in public than you do. Your future has no privacy, not because of some police-state governmental tendencies or corporate malfeasance, but because computers naturally produce data.
Cardinal Richelieu famously said: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." When all your words and actions can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply.
Future generations will look back at us - living in the early decades of the information age - and judge our solutions to the proliferation of data
Society works precisely because conversation is ephemeral; because people forget, and because people don't have to justify every word they utter.
Conversation is not the same thing as correspondence. Words uttered in haste over morning coffee, whether spoken in a coffee shop or thumbed on a BlackBerry, are not official correspondence. A data pattern indicating "terrorist tendencies" is no substitute for a real investigation. Being constantly scrutinized furthermore, it's creepy. Privacy isn't just about having something to hide; it's a basic right that to democracy, liberty, and our humanity.
We're not going to stop the march of technology, just as we cannot un-invent the automobile or the coal furnace. We spent the industrial age relying on fossil fuels that polluted our air and transformed our climate. Now we are working to address the consequences. (While still using said fossil fuels, of course.) This time around, maybe we can be a little more proactive.
Just as we look back at the beginning of the previous century and shake our heads at how people could ignore the pollution they caused, future generations will look back at us - living in the early decades of the information age - and judge our solutions to the proliferation of data.
We must, all of us together, start discussing this major societal change and what it means. And we must work out a way to create a future that our grandchildren will be proud of.

Cell phone stories writing new chapter in print publishing

CNN) -- Yume-Hotaru's first novel was a best-seller in Japanese bookstores, and he wrote it entirely with his thumbs.

Publishers in Japan were quick to see the potential of putting cellphone novels into print.

The 22-year-old who would rather be identified by his pen name than his real one (Yume-Hotaru means "Dreaming Firefly" in Japanese) started composing the novel on his cell phone in 2007.
Between classes, on the bus or before going to bed at night, he would type single sentences into his phone's tiny keypad, uploading each one straight to the mobile social networking site Mobage-town.
The more Yume-Hotaru posted, the more popular his story became. It won a prize and soon publishers approached him, asking if he wanted to turn his digital book into a paper one. By early 2008, his novel "First Experience," a story about love and sex in high school, was a top title in one of Tokyo's biggest bookstores.
Since it emerged in Japan nearly a decade ago, the cell phone novel, or keitai shosetsu, has moved from a little-known subgenre to a mainstream literary phenomenon. Keitai shosetsu sites boast billions of monthly users while publishers sell millions of copies of cellular stories taken from phones and turned into paperback.
It is even spreading to other countries as other cultures start to take part in a type of composition long considered purely Japanese.
As the name suggests, cell phone novels are written entirely on handsets and posted on sites like Maho no i-rando (Magic Island), the first and largest mobile novel portal in Japan. The site has a million titles, 3.5 billion monthly visitors and six million registered users, according to the company. Mobile readers instantly see new chapters as they are added, often adding comments about the direction they think a novel should take.
The diary-like stories are written and read mostly by young women in their teens and 20's. Many authors use pen names and claim their stories are at least partially autobiographical. The novels often center on themes that are rarely discussed aloud in Japanese society -- drugs, sex, pregnancy, abortion, rape and disease.
"When they write those novels, they share their secret, personal problems, and when they read by mobile phones, they can hide what they are reading," explained Toshie Takahashi, an associate professor of media studies at Rikkyo University in Tokyo.
"They are also involved and engaged with their mobile phones very strongly," added Takahashi, noting that 96 percent of high school students own a cell phone in Japan.
"The mobile phone itself is embedded in young people's everyday lives very deeply and also emotionally and physically."
Despite its popularity among young women, a male writer known as Yoshi, widely considered the first cellular novelist, brought the burgeoning genre to light when he self-published "Deep Love" in 2002. The story about a prostitute in Tokyo sold nearly 3 million copies and was adapted for film, television and Manga, or Japanese comics.
Publishing phenomenon
A struggling Japanese publishing industry was quick to take notice of the growing popularity of keitai shosetsu, especially early works like Yoshi's "Deep Love." Many of the popular cell phone novels have since been turned into paperbacks, and bookstores across Japan now have entire sections devoted to the digital-age literary genre.
By 2007, half of the country's 10 best-selling novels were written on cell phones, according to book distributor Tohan while last year mobile novels and comics were a $240 million market in Japan, which is over 5 percent of the country's $4.5 billion total mobile content market, according to Japan's Mobile Content Forum.
In January 2009, three Japanese mobile phone novel publishers reported collective sales of 1.7 million copies. Publishers, like Goma Books, one of the first to print cell phone novels, have also launched their own keitai shosetsu sites, which they use to sift through for talent whose work will be marketable on bookshelves.
Goma's mobile story site Orion carries 20,000 novels and has approximately two million monthly users, according to the company. Goma has also published several top-selling keitai shosetsu, including "The Red Thread," by Mei (also a pen name).
Since it was released in 2007, the story, which revolves around the romance of two middle school students, has sold nearly 2 million copies and was adapted for a TV series and movie last December. The publishing house now prints a new mobile novel every month.
Some literary purist don't think the cell phone novels constitute real literature, but their popularity is undeniable.
Don't Miss
For many Chinese, literary dreams go online
Android prepares to battle Apple
Can happiness be found online?
"The sentences may be a bit immature. It doesn't have a major plot line sometimes. It is just love stories of ordinary high school girls, said Aya Tanaka, a spokesperson for Goma. "But it is kind of like popular comics, it is what the teenagers want to read, and for the publishers, it is quite a big market and it does sell."
Michael Keferl, a trend consultant with Cscout Japan in Tokyo, believes that "[readers] are participating in the creation of the novel, which is one of the reasons why they buy it afterwards. They are helping to write it and are also witnessing it being written."
Crossing cultures
However some believe the future of keitai shosetsu as one that is quickly following in the footsteps of most teenage fads: A sudden and rapid rise to mass popularity followed by a slow but steady decline to the fringes of the not-so-cool.
Last year few mobile novels appeared on best-seller lists while new stories published online have lost their characteristic edginess, said Chiaki Ishihara, a Japanese literature expert at Waseda University in Tokyo who has studied cell phone novels.
"Keitai shosetsu is rapidly declining at this point," Ishihara told CNN. "In a few years, it may not even be considered a subculture."
Others see the cell phone novel moving from an initial boom that peaked around 2007 to a period of market stabilization.
"You are not going to have as many of the big hits as you had before because there are so many titles out," said Keferl. "Things are leveling out now."
While the cell phone novel market may be cooling in Japan, it is just starting to emerge in other countries, like the United States, where faster networks and cheaper data plans are leading more consumers to use handsets in ways similar to people in Japan.
Many companies are starting to launch mobile web sites in the U.S., including DeNA, the Japanese firm that owns Mobage-town, the site where Yume-Hotaru writes his keitai shosetsu.
"What has surprised us is users in America are behaving in a similar way to the Japanese," said Dai Watanabe, president of DeNA Global, Inc. "They are writing about things that are very close to their actual lives. I was surprised to see it is very similar with what is happening in Japan."
Julian Knighten, a 22-year-old who works three jobs, writes his cell phone stories while lying in bed at night in his home outside of Dallas, Texas.
He said he had never heard of keitai shosetsu before but likes writing cell phone novels because of the relationship he has with readers and the feedback they give him about his stories.
"It encourages me to write," said Knighten. "And it gives me the chance to escape reality."

iPhones for Verizon? iPhones for Everyone!

The biggest flaw in Apple's near-perfect iPhone has always been the network it's on. So as rumors have arisen once more (based on an old story from September) of Apple developing an iPhone for Verizon Wireless, the most reliable cell-phone network in the U.S., the Internet has been going nuts. Of course Apple wants to develop an iPhone for Verizon. At this point, Apple wants to develop an iPhone for everyone. It's just got one problem: the hideous, mysterious, Faustian contract it signed with AT&T. And that one is a show-stopper.
Apple's exclusivity contract with AT&T was an attempt to rewrite the economics of the cell-phone business. It wasn't about visual voice mail or even, really, about branding. It was about money and control. In exchange for a bond of blood, AT&T would kick some of its monthly subscription fees to Apple and let Apple control retail distribution. This was radical. This was unique. This was a failure.
The iPhone sold well here, but the U.S. is a fraction of the global mobile market, and international carriers weren't too comfortable with Apple cutting into their monthlies. It turned out that mobile-phone carriers around the world are much more comfortable kicking in one-time subsidies than kicking back monthly fees. So for the international market Apple went to a much more normal system of accounting (normal for the cell-phone industry, that is), and the iPhone has sold spectacular numbers around the world.
Along the way, Apple has also learned that tying itself to one wireless carrier damages, rather than reinforces, its brand, because the quality of its product becomes too tightly coupled to the quality of that carrier. Notice that in many of Apple's "later" countries, the iPhone is available on multiple carriers. Apple's Tim Cook has clearly said the company isn't married to a one-carrier strategy.
Apple has also gotten more flexible on pricing and distribution, which were the two major stumbling blocks when Apple first tried to get Verizon interested in the first-generation iPhone, at least if you believe USA Today. Heck, the iPhone is now even available at Wal-Mart. Apple of 2009, as opposed to Apple of 2006, is much more willing to work with mobile-phone carriers and third-party retailers as partners.
Mobile-phone carriers have learned things in the past two years, too. Everyone's dabbled with visual voice mail. Phones like the T-Mobile G1 and the Palm Pre have made U.S. carriers more comfortable with phone manufacturers taking a starring role in product rollouts and software updates, though Apple takes that kind of control to a new level. Two years have also proved that the iPhone is a unique phenomenon that everybody wants in on.
So Apple will put iPhones on everyone's network, but in the U.S., it will want to put them on Verizon's first. Verizon is now the largest carrier in the country. Also, Sprint has what Apple would consider an unhealthy relationship with Palm, and T-Mobile has that Google thing going on.
If the iPhone were to go to Verizon before 2010, Apple would have to build a version for Verizon's CDMA network. That would have been a great chore back in 2007. Apple isn't actually that big a company; developing two cell phones from scratch would have been a big deal for them. But they're going on their third phone by now, and they have a few years of experience. They could do it now.
It takes a year or so to develop a new phone for Verizon (and especially to get it both through the FCC and through Verizon's own hellish network-testing process). But Apple plans ahead: It'll have that phone ready when its AT&T contract is up. Verizon will likely demand a three-month CDMA exclusivity agreement, which Apple will consent to. Sprint and T-Mobile will follow after a few months.
If the AT&T contract lasts past 2010, a Verizon launch gets even easier. The iPhone could be one of the first devices on Verizon's new LTE network, which will use a fourth-generation network technology that Verizon will share with AT&T, T-Mobile, and dozens of international carriers. An LTE iPhone would eventually be an almost universal device.
Apple's AT&T contract is still shrouded in mystery. All we know about it is that it's "multiyear." Under the most liberal interpretation, that means Apple could be out from under AT&T's thumb in July. But USA Today has said in separate stories that the contract runs through the end of 2010 or even 2012, which puts the Verizon launch firmly in the LTE zone. I'm pretty sure that whenever that clock goes "ding," a whole lot more people will get to buy iPhones

Google introduces ads to Google News (AFP)

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Google has introduced ads to the results of search queries on Google News in a move aimed at turning the news aggregation site into a money-making venture that may raise the hackles of newspapers and other media outlets.
Josh Cohen, a business project manager at Google, announced the change in a post on the official Google News blog on Wednesday.
"What this means is that when you enter a query like iPhone or Kindle into the Google News search box, you'll see text ads alongside your News search results -- similar to what you see on regular Google searches," Cohen wrote.
A search for Kindle, Amazon's electronic book reader, for example, returns links to news articles and a list of "sponsored links" such as Amazon's Kindle page and ads for other readers such as Sony's eBook device.
"In recent months we've been experimenting with a variety of different formats," Cohen said. "We've always said that we'd unveil these changes when we could offer a good experience for our users, publishers and advertisers alike."
"We'll continue to look at ways to deliver ads that are relevant for users and good for publishers, too," Cohen said, adding that the ads would only appear on Google News search-results pages in the United States.
Google News aggregates headlines from more than 4,500 English-language news sources around the world and provides links to articles on their websites.
The articles are selected, according to Google, "by computers that evaluate, among other things, how often and on what sites a story appears online."
The introduction of ads to Google News search is the latest attempt by the Mountain View, California-based company to monetize its various Web ventures.
Google makes most of its money from Internet search advertising but gradually has been introducing advertising to other properties during the past year, such as YouTube, Google Maps and Google Finance.
Google purchased YouTube in 2006 for 1.65 billion dollars and has been searching for ways to translate its immense popularity into a money-making venture without alienating its huge fan base.
John Battle, a media analyst and the founder of Wired magazine, wrote on his blog, battellemedia.com, that the introduction of ads to Google News search was likely to prove controversial.
He noted that the Google announcement did not mention "sharing revenues with the news (organizations) who provide Google News its content."
"I presume that Google gets paid per click for action on those ad offerings," said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based non-profit journalism school.
"But I doubt that they have any particular plans to share that with the people whose news they're aggregating."
Kelly McBride, another Poynter faculty member, said "it's always been obvious that Google didn't develop Google News as a public service -- they intended to make money off it.
"I'm OK with Google News making money," she said. "I hope that they will share it with the content creators."
Agence France-Presse and Google signed a licensing agreement in April 2007 giving the search engine the right to post AFP news and photos on Google News.
The agreement settled a lawsuit filed by AFP against Google in March 2005 accusing it of copyright infringement for allegedly posting AFP headlines, news summaries and photographs without permission

Facebook to let users give input on policies (AP)

NEW YORK - Facebook is trying its hand at democracy.
The fast-growing online hangout, whose more than 175 million worldwide users could form the world's sixth-largest country behind Brazil, said Thursday that those users will play a "meaningful role" in deciding the site's policies and voting on changes.
Facebook is trying to recover from last week's policy-change blunder that sparked tens of thousands to join online protests. At issue was who controls the information, like photos, posts and messages, that people share with their friends on the site.
On Thursday, founder Mark Zuckerberg once again sought to reassure users that they are the owners, not Facebook. And in a broader step, the company also said its users will get a hand in determining the various policies — such as privacy, ownership and sharing — by reviewing, commenting and voting on them before they are put in place.
"As people share more information on services like Facebook, a new relationship is created between Internet companies and the people they serve," Zuckerberg said in a statement. "The past week reminded us that users feel a real sense of ownership over Facebook itself, not just the information they share."
In a conference call, Zuckerberg said the purpose of Facebook is to make the world more transparent by giving people the power to share information, and as such Facebook itself should be transparent as well.
Earlier this month, the site quietly updated its terms of use — its governing document — sparking an uproar after popular consumer rights advocacy blog Consumerist.com referred to them as "We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever."
After tens of thousands protested, Facebook decided to revert to its previous user policies while it figured out how best to update them.
The latest controversy was not the first time Facebook angered its users, who have come to expect a sense of privacy even as they share things with friends.
In late 2007, a tracking tool called "Beacon" caught users off-guard by broadcasting information about their shopping habits and activities at other Web sites. After initially resisting, the company ultimately allowed users to turn Beacon off. A redesign of the site last year also prompted thousands to protest, but in that case Facebook kept its new look.
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook is privately held. Microsoft Corp. bought a 1.6 percent stake in the company in 2007 for $240 million as part of a broader advertising partnership.

Galaxy may be full of 'Earths,' alien life

CNN) -- As NASA prepares to hunt for Earth-like planets in our corner of the Milky Way galaxy, there's new buzz that "Star Trek's" vision of a universe full of life may not be that far-fetched.

An artist's impression shows a planet passing in front of its parent star. Such events are called transits.

Pointy-eared aliens traveling at light speed are staying firmly in science fiction, but scientists are offering fresh insights into the possible existence of inhabited worlds and intelligent civilizations in space.
There may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy, said Alan Boss, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution and author of the new book "The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets."
He made the prediction based on the number of "super-Earths" -- planets several times the mass of the Earth, but smaller than gas giants like Jupiter -- discovered so far circling stars outside the solar system.
Boss said that if any of the billions of Earth-like worlds he believes exist in the Milky Way have liquid water, they are likely to be home to some type of life.
"Now that's not saying that they're all going to be crawling with intelligent human beings or even dinosaurs," he said.
"But I would suspect that the great majority of them at least will have some sort of primitive life, like bacteria or some of the multicellular creatures that populated our Earth for the first 3 billion years of its existence."
Putting a number on alien worlds
Other scientists are taking another approach: an analysis that suggests there could be hundreds, even thousands, of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland constructed a computer model to create a synthetic galaxy with billions of stars and planets. They then studied how life evolved under various conditions in this virtual world, using a supercomputer to crunch the results.
Galaxy Quest• The Milky Way is believed to be more than 13 billion years old.• It is just one of billions of galaxies in the universe.• The Milky Way has a circumference of about 250,000-300,000 light years.• It is about 100,000 light years in diameter.• There are three types of galaxies: ellipticals, spirals and irregulars.• The Milky Way is a large disk-shaped barred spiral galaxy. (A barred galaxy has a bar-shaped structure in its middle.)Source: Space.com
In a paper published recently in the International Journal of Astrobiology, the researchers concluded that based on what they saw, at least 361 intelligent civilizations have emerged in the Milky Way since its creation, and as many as 38,000 may have formed.
Duncan Forgan, a doctoral candidate at the university who led the study, said he was surprised by the hardiness of life on these other worlds.
"The computer model takes into account what we refer to as resetting or extinction events. The classic example is the asteroid impact that may have wiped out the dinosaurs," Forgan said.
"I half-expected these events to disallow the rise of intelligence, and yet civilizations seemed to flourish."
Forgan readily admits the results are an educated guess at best, since there are still many unanswered questions about how life formed on Earth and only limited information about the 330 "exoplanets" -- those circling sun-like stars outside the solar system -- discovered so far.
The first was confirmed in 1995 and the latest just this month when Europe's COROT space telescope spotted the smallest terrestrial exoplanet ever found. With a diameter less than twice the size of Earth, the planet orbits very close to its star and has temperatures up to 1,500° Celsius (more than 2,700° Fahrenheit), according to the European Space Agency. It may be rocky and covered in lava.
Hunt for habitable planets
NASA is hoping to find much more habitable worlds with the help of the upcoming Kepler mission. The spacecraft, set to be launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida next week, will search for Earth-size planets in our part of the galaxy.
Don't Miss
Kepler contains a special telescope that will study 100,000 stars in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way for more than three years. It will look for small dips in a star's brightness, which can mean an orbiting planet is passing in front it -- an event called a transit.
"It's akin to measuring a flea as it creeps across the headlight of an automobile at night," said Kepler project manager James Fanson during a during a NASA news conference.
The focus of the mission is finding planets in a star's habitable zone, an orbit that would ensure temperatures in which life could existBoss, who serves on the Kepler Science Council, said scientists should know by 2013 -- the end of Kepler's mission -- whether life in the universe could be widespread.
Finding intelligent life is a very different matter. For all the speculation about the possibility of other civilizations in the universe, the question remains: If the rise of life on Earth isn't unique and aliens are common, why haven't they shown up or contacted us? The contradiction was famously summed up by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 in what became known as the Fermi paradox: "Where is everybody?"
The answer may be the vastness of time and space, scientists explained.
"Civilizations come and go," Boss said. "Chances are, if you do happen to find a planet which is going to have intelligent life, it's not going to be in [the same] phase of us. It may have formed a billion years ago, or maybe it's not going to form for another billion years."
Even if intelligent civilizations did exist at the same time, they probably would be be separated by tens of thousands of light years, Forgan said. If aliens have just switched on their transmitter to communicate, it could take us hundreds of centuries to receive their message, he added.
As for interstellar travel, the huge distances virtually rule out any extraterrestrial visitors. To illustrate, Boss said the fastest rockets available to us right now are those being used in NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto. Even going at that rate of speed, it would take 100,000 years to get from Earth to the closest star outside the solar system, he added.
"So when you think about that, maybe we shouldn't be worried about having interstellar air raids any time soon," Boss said.

Online relief for the recession-weary

CNN) -- If finding a real job evades you, now may be the perfect time to just pretend you have one.
ResumeShirts.com, launching Tuesday, will allow customers to print their resumes on customized T-shirts.
Fake employees, corporate seat-fillers, are reportedly being paid by New York advertising agencies to dress and act like they work in firms so prospective clients visiting the offices will be instilled with confidence.
Sound crazy? Not to Jeremy Redleaf, the 24-year-old founder of Odd Job Nation, a Web site scheduled to officially launch today.
"Seriously! I have friends who do this," Redleaf says, before rattling off some of the other "exclusive odd jobs" he's compiling. "We want to be the resource for the new growing army of part-time opportunists ... You've got to hustle life before life hustles you."
Assuming your Internet access hasn't gone the way of your 401(k) savings, the Web is now rich with sites and blogs that offer information, support, survival tips and even comic relief to those who are feeling the financial pinch.
Some sites chronicle recession news for those who can stomach it. Among them are
Don't MissIn Depth: 44th President -- State of the Nation The Daily Bail, which keeps tabs on all things bailout; Timely Demise, which covers the retail industry; and a Twitter page called The Media is Dying, which honors the media dead.
But many new sites exist simply to foster community, or at least make people realize they are not alone.
The 405 Club, a reference to New York's $405-a-week maximum unemployment benefit, invites visitors to become part of the "fastest growing club in New York." Laid-off Dad offers insights into one New York City man's travails. ResumeShirts.com, another Jeremy Redleaf venture, allows customers to print resumes and cover letters on customized T-shirts.
Pink Slips are the New Black, dubbed "the blog for unemployed people by unemployed people," was the brainchild of two 20-something women in New York. Visit the "about" page and the message is simple: "We're broke. We're angry. We're frustrated. We're unemployed ... Like you. There is strength in numbers. Join us."
Though the blog started as a way "to channel our anger," co-founder Bridget Sweeny -- a real estate marketing casualty -- says they're now targeting others in their age group with an "irreverent, fun and cheeky" approach. Postings, for example, share fears about moving back in with the parents and listings for awful jobs that make not working more palatable.
Billing itself as a "pop-up site" (a now trademarked term) that is "ready and willing to die," is Recessionwire, which was launched earlier this month. The site's mission is to provide inspiration and offer tips to those who are navigating the recession's rocky road.
"There's a lot of stuff out there about doom and gloom," Laura Rich, one of the three co-founders, says. "From a competitive standpoint, we don't need to compete with that ... We want to help people to be more creative, to use this opportunity to shift things in their lives." Watch founders discuss Recessionwire »
A recent post offered "tips for making the most of your closet misfits," while another revealed the silver lining found in restaurant deals. A recurring column entitled "Love in the Time of Layoff," appears amid "Recession Recipes" that can be whipped up on the cheap, and uplifting tales of "Lemonade Makers" who've made good out of bad times.
Not everyone, however, is able to put a positive spin on the financial crisis, which is why Ben Carey, 37, and Henrik Delehag, 35 -- two London, England, satirists and authors who collectively go by Benrik -- launched Recession Blocker in October.
By using this search tool, one can access a news site without having to read any bad news, because every possible word and phrase that could be seen as a downer (think "cash-strapped," "financial turmoil" or "unemployment") is blacked out.
"The media were making matters worse by talking about it [the recession] non-stop and scaring people out of spending," Carey says, before adding that the heavy traffic has caused his server to crash several times. "It clearly hits a nerve with a wide range of people who are overwhelmed by recession stories."
A character named "Joe" on Odd Job Nation approaches the crisis tongue in cheek. His "penny-pinching tips," for example, encourage readers to make late-day visits to bakeries for free carbs and bring backpacks to friends' places to nab an occasional light bulb.
When transportation needs become desperate, Joe even suggests taking a bicycle from a small child.
"It's good to experience disappointment when you're still developing," he reasons.
For those who can't steal from children, avoid recession news or escape their own bleak realities, Marlin Potash, a New York City psychologist of 30 years, was inspired to step into the blogosphere for the first time. Her blog, Feeling Up in Down Times, went live about six weeks ago.
It's been Potash's way to "bring psychology to the people," at a time when many can't afford it or are stymied by what they perceive as the stigma of going to therapy, she explains.
By offering advice online, including stress-reduction tips such as the "3 Minute Bathroom Meditation," she's hoping to bring what she knows from her field to the recession-weary masses who may never step into a professional's office