Facebook Users Outraged Over New Changes

Facebook is at it again. The social network is tweaking the home pages of its 750 million users, much to the chagrin of some very vocal folks.

The world's largest online social network is expected to announce even more changes on Thursday, when it holds its annual f8 conference in San Francisco for developers who create games and other applications for its site.

The gathering follows a trickle of changes to Facebook in the past few of weeks. Some, such as larger photo displays and a feature that makes it easier to group friends into categories, were met with approval - or at least silence, which in the age of social-media oversharing could well be considered an endorsement.

Then came Wednesday, when many users woke up to find their homepages altered, with what Facebook calls "top stories" on the top of their pages, followed by "recent stories" listed in chronological order. On the right side, meanwhile, there's something called a "ticker," a live feed of all the ongoing activity that also appears in users' news feeds. It's a kind of Facebook inside Facebook, if you will.

By mid-morning, the words "new Facebook" quickly became one of the most discussed topics on Twitter. Many comments were negative, though some pointed out that Facebook makes many changes to its site and people eventually get used to it.

Then there were the jokes. John Kovalic from Madison, Wisconsin poked fun at Netflix's recent public relations fiasco, tweeting: "On the plus side, at least the new Facebook isn't calling itself "Qwikface." (Netflix, for those who missed it, is facing a big backlash from its subscribers because it raised prices and renamed its popular DVD-by-mail service "Qwikster.") Another online critic liked Facebook to a pop star who's addicted to cosmetic surgery.

For its part, Facebook has long asserted that it makes changes to keep users engaged, and that those alterations are often based on user requests. Other tweaks derive from the company's study of activity on Facebook and what it thinks people will enjoy using. Privacy advocates, meanwhile, have contended that Facebook changes its site in order to get people to share as much as possible about their habits, hobbies and likes -all to give advertisers a better picture of who to target.

In reality, it's a little of both. The way Facebook sees it, the more people enjoy using the site, the more time they'll spend there.

The latest changes are "tailored at making sure this news feed is what you want to see," said Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering at Facebook.

And, so far, that's been good for business -despite the grumblings of vocal minority of Facebook users. The company is expected to bring in $3.8 billion in worldwide advertising this year and $5.8 billion in 2012, according to research firm eMarketer.

Facebook is well-aware of perhaps the biggest downside of being the world's largest social network: With so many users, pleasing all of them is difficult. Schroepfer said the tweaks to the news feed are meant to appeal to a broad range of people, whether they have 15 friends and log in once a week or 800 and spend four hours a day on the site.

"We want to make sure we provide the right kind of basics to make sure that the core of Facebook is sharing and (seeing) the right kind of things," he said.

Facebook, though clearly king of social networks, is also competing with Twitter and Google Plus for attention. As such, the race to add new features has the potential to confuse users, said Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst at eMarketer.

"It's like...who's going to come up with the best, most interesting features to keep people using their service," she said. "Everyone is copying each other, making sure whatever feature Twitter offers, Facebook offers, whatever Facebook offers, Google Plus offers."

On Thursday, Facebook is likely to push forward again, unveiling a slew of new ways to share content on its site and beyond. It keeps changing because if it doesn't, it could go the way of MySpace, the once-great social network that even an ownership stake by Justin Timberlake seems unlikely to rescue.

"The idea of a social network and what a social network is continues to evolve," Williamson said. "First it was creating a profile and sending status updates to your friends. Facebook is (now) going toward helping companies be more social and helping consumers and users feel like they have a stronger connection to these...businesses, media and things they are interested in."

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Would Meg Whitman be up to running HP?

Meg Whitman is allegedly a top pick to be Hewlett-Packard's next CEO, but the to-do list is massive and it's unclear whether swapping leaders will make that much of a difference.

Meg Whitman

(Credit: cc Flickr/Max Morse)

The larger questions revolve around whether HP has a board of directors problem, a leadership issue, or a questionable master plan, assuming it still has one. Perhaps it's all of the above.

The to-do list for Whitman would go like this:

1. Decide what to do with the PC business. Should it stay or go?

2. Determine if HP's software strategy is correct and figure out if Autonomy is the right fit.

3. Fix the services business and move it to higher margin deals.

4. Figure out whether HP pulled the plug on the TouchPad too early.

5. Define HP.

But those are just the short-term items for HP. In the longer run, HP has to decide whether its recent issues are about the leadership--CEO Leo Apotheker wasn't up to snuff?--or about its plan to ditch PCs and bolster software and services. HP's board met yesterday but didn't pull the trigger on Apotheker. However, that vote of no confidence has already damaged HP and Apotheker. The company looks rudderless.

Assuming HP's plan revolves around cloud computing, services, software, and integrated systems, it's worth asking whether Whitman is up to the task. Some analysts already question whether Whitman is the right candidate.

Collins Stewart analyst Louis Miscioscia said in a research note:

Whitman has not run a company the size of HP, nor one focused on the enterprise, both of which are concerns that are made more important by the fact that HP is in need of a turnaround in many lines of business, not just a new strategic direction.

Here's a look at the Whitman ledger:

Running a large organization. Whitman grew eBay from just a pup to a massive business. The growth and scale of eBay in the glory days was impressive. Under new leadership, eBay has reinvented itself courtesy of the PayPal acquisition. However, HP has annual revenue north of $100 billion. There are only a few leaders who can manage that scale.

Familiarity with HP. Whitman recently joined HP's board and should know the problems intimately. At the very least, Whitman knows the strategy and theoretically was on board with it.

Hardware know-how. There's nothing in Whitman's experience that indicates that she can pitch servers, know the roadmaps or figure out what HP's ultimate strategy should be. Then again, Apotheker wasn't a hardware guy either.

Software strategy. Whitman knows Web and e-commerce software and scaling an enterprise via her eBay experience. Apotheker knew applications via SAP. The larger question is whether HP's strategy for software makes sense going forward. Was Whitman in favor of the Autonomy acquisition? It's possible. Under Whitman's tenure eBay bought Skype in a deal that didn't quite work out as planned.

Services. Whitman should know the consulting business since she was a consultant at Bain. You could argue that HP's last two CEOs--Mark Hurd and Leo Apotheker--didn't get the high touch strategic nature of consulting. The biggest issue is that it will take years to get HP services running at a strategic level.

Branding. Whitman's experience at Disney, Hasbro, and Procter & Gamble indicates that she will know a lot more about branding than her predecessors.

Managing expectations. One of HP's biggest problems is that it can't manage expectations. Hurd could, but he's the only CEO in recent history that could pull all the levers to please Wall Street. Whitman should be a vast improvement over Apotheker, who managed to deliver earnings conference call debacles in his short tenure.

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Google Battles Charges Of Search Bias

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt defended his company at a Senate hearing in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, by insisting that Google is not Microsoft and that Google continues to adhere to pro-competitive principles that serve consumers.

Schmidt did not mention Microsoft by name. Rather he referred to an unnamed large technology company 20 years ago that faced regulatory intervention. He was alluding to U.S. v. Microsoft.

"That company lost sight of what mattered and Washington stepped in," Schmidt said. He insisted that Google has learned the lessons of the antitrust case against Microsoft that concluded in 2001. "We get it," he said.

At issue was whether Google--through its search business and related interests--serves consumers or threatens competition, a charge that Microsoft has been making since 2007 when Google announced its intention to acquire DoubleClick. Since then, as Google has become more dominant and entered new businesses, calls to constrain the company have grown louder.

[Find out more about the search technology that has Google's competitors complaining. See Google Universal Search, A Massive Effort.]

Some regulators already believe that Google has behaved in an anticompetitive fashion: European regulators are in the midst of an antitrust inquiry into Google's search business. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is doing likewise. The Texas Attorney General is also looking into Google's search business practices, and other state-level investigations may be in the works.

At the hearing, skepticism about Google was well represented. Thomas O. Barnett, a partner at Covington & Burling who has represented TripAdvisor, said, "I consider Google to be a dominant company with monopoly power at least in search and advertising."

Google's competitors argue that the company acts to hinder competition. Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp, charged that Google has acted anticompetitively in two ways: by presenting Yelp review content in Google's competing Places service and by favoring its Places service in search results.

Google insists that it plays fairly and has set up a Web page to address the charges against it. But the complaints have already prompted Google to change some of its practices: In response to Yelp's objection to Google's use of its content, Google has complied and no longer shows Yelp content in its Places product.

The charge that Google favors its own content over third-party content is a bit more complicated. The rebuttal Google published online echoes a point Schmidt made over and over in response to claims that Google promotes its own services at the expense of other companies in search results.

"Sometimes the best, most useful answer to a query is one of the traditional 10 blue links,'" Google states. "But sometimes it's a news article, sports score, stock quote, flight times, video, shopping results, or a map--any of which we may place above or among the other results from across the Web. Every search engine has shifted toward providing more answers directly in the search results--because it's what consumers want."

What this means is that Google search results are not purely the product of the Google search algorithm. Rather the search results generated by Google's ostensibly neutral search algorithm get augmented with other links when Google's other algorithms determine an answer can be provided by, say, presenting a Google Maps link. This aggregation of search systems is called universal search.

The way universal search works is not widely understood and makes trying to recognize bias by analyzing the relative position of links on search results pages far more difficult for outsiders. It's simply not clear where algorithmic search results get modified by other universal search factors to generate the final list of links presented to Google users.

In the absence of clarity about where Google search results originate, Google has to confront misapprehensions. For example, Senator Mike Lee of Utah questioned why Google product search ranked third so consistently when product comparison sites did not fare so well on average. Schmidt had to explain that Lee was making an apples-to-oranges comparison.

"In general, what's happening here is product comparison sites being compared against products," Schmidt explained.

Lee appeared unconvinced and insisted Google appeared to be cooking its search results.

"I can assure you that we've not cooked anything," Schmidt replied, evidently unperturbed by the government grilling.

Senator Al Franken later expressed frustration about the lack of transparency around how Google ranks search results. He noted that Schmidt had been asked whether Google's search rankings reflect an unbiased algorithm and that Schmidt replied with less than a certain, affirmative response.

That lack of certainty, Franken said, "really bothers me because that's the crux of this."

Despite the fact that Google's search algorithm is nothing but a collection of biases that attempt to define what's relevant, one possible outcome of the hearing and the related scrutiny about how Google ranks its search results may be an effort to label the source of results in universal search. Just as Google labels sponsored search results, it could label "house" search results, as internal ads are often called.

Asked what Google could to do address complaints, Stoppelman urged the separation of Google properties from algorithmic search links. This would mean the end of universal search as we know it, or at least the extensive labeling of links assembled through universal search.

But not every competitor of Google's wants to see the search company regulated.

"[W]e don't need federal intervention to level the playing field with Google," wrote Rich Skrenta, CEO of search engine Blekko in a blog post. "Innovation and competition are far more powerful instruments to battle companies that have grown powerful and influential. ... The success of Google should be applauded on Capitol Hill, not derided."

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Pope Benedict making first official visit to Germany

The Pope was greeted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Christian Wulff

Benedict XVI, the German head of the Roman Catholic Church, has begun his first official visit to his home country as Pope.

After arriving in the capital Berlin, he called on Catholics disgusted by priests who had abused children not to abandon the Church.

The visit may be one of his most difficult to date, with strong protests expected against his teachings.

He is to address parliament and say Mass in Berlin's Olympic Stadium.

The 84-year-old pontiff will travel widely across the country, where there are officially 25 million Catholics - one in three of the population.

He has visited Germany unofficially several times since assuming the Church's highest office, travelling to Catholic strongholds in the Rhineland and his native Bavaria.

However, this tour will take him into historically Protestant regions and parts of the atheistic old East Germany.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, daughter of a Lutheran pastor who grew up in East Germany, said Christian unity would be a focus of the Pope's visit.

In Erfurt on Friday, Pope Benedict will meet members of Germany's Lutheran Church in the monastery where Luther studied as a monk in the early 16th Century, before breaking with Rome and launching the Protestant Reformation.

'Bad fish'

A record 181,000 German Catholics officially quit the Church last year, a total for the first time higher than that for Protestants leaving their churches, Reuters news agency reports.

Disgust at the Church's handling of child sex abuse by clergy was one factor.

"I can understand that in the face of such reports, people, especially those close to victims, would say 'this isn't my Church any more'," the Pope said in an interview on his plane before arriving.

But he added: "The Church is a net of the Lord that pulls in good fish and bad fish.

"We have to learn to live with the scandals and work against the scandals from inside the great net of the Church."

Child abuse survivors are expected to join protests against the papal visit.

Boycott

After being greeted at Berlin's Tegel airport by an artillery salute and a guard of honour, the pontiff was welcomed by Mrs Merkel and President Christian Wulff.

Visiting Mr Wulff's residence in the city, Pope Benedict said: "I am not here first and foremost... to follow particular political, or economic, aims but to meet the people and to speak to them about God."

Anti-Pope protesters handed out condoms at Berlin's Tegel airport

Campaigners have taken issue with the Catholic stance on homosexuality and contraception, and some MPs - possibly as many as 100 - plan to boycott the Pope's speech to parliament, the Bundestag, on Thursday.

German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich, a Protestant, criticised the planned boycott, accusing MPs of "arrogance, narrow-mindedness and provincialism".

Berlin's openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, said he welcomed the Pope's visit and would meet him personally, but he also expressed understanding for the protesters.

Correspondents note that both Mr Wowereit and President Wulff, who is divorced and remarried, are Catholics who in the eyes of the Church lead sinful lifestyles.

Mr Wulff referred to German Catholics alienated by the Church when he spoke during Thursday's papal visit.

"Many ask themselves how mercifully it treats people who have suffered break-ups in their own lives," the divorced president said.

He said it was "important for the Church to remain close to the people and not to turn inward on itself".

One of the highlights of the visit is a Mass to be held on Thursday evening at the Olympic Stadium.

The stadium, where Hitler hosted the 1936 games, is now a popular sporting and entertainment venue, and some 70,000 people are expected to attend the Mass.

Other events during the tour include a meeting with former Chancellor Helmut Kohl and a visit to the strongly Catholic city of Freiburg in the south-west.

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US suspects Pakistan's hand in Kabul embassy attack

US officials say there is growing evidence that Pakistan's intelligence agency encouraged a Pakistan-based militant group, the Haqqani network, to carry out last week's attack on the US Embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The US and Pakistan have long been at odds over the links between Pakistan's intelligence agency and military, and Pakistani militant groups such as the Haqqani network. With the US preparing for a drawdown in Afghanistan, the presence of militant groups is now a top concern, as is Pakistan's quiet support for them.

The US has tried to pressure Pakistan into breaking its ties to militants, but has so far been unsuccessful – Pakistan sees the militant groups as necessary leverage in the region.

For several weeks after the American raid in May that killed Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil, the relationship between the two countries seemed on the verge of severing, but relations improved over the summer. However, last week's attack in Kabul sent them spiraling downward once again amid US criticism of Pakistan for failing to crack down on the Haqqani network, Reuters reports.

"We covered ... the need for the Haqqani Network to disengage, specifically the need for the ISI [Pakistan's intelligence agency] to disconnect from Haqqani and from this proxy war that they're fighting," [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen] said in a speech to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Tuesday.

"The ISI has been doing this – working for – supporting proxies for an extended period of time. It is a strategy in the country and I think that strategic approach has to shift in the future."

"The increasingly tough U.S. rhetoric – particularly the accusation of a proxy relationship – reflects a US belief that Pakistani intelligence in recent months has more aggressively facilitated attacks by the Haqqanis on Afghan and American targets inside Afghanistan," a US military official told the Associated Press.

Pakistan's thinly veiled support for militant groups is particularly concerning, with the US drawdown in Afghanistan and peace negotiations between the Taliban and Afghan government on the horizon.

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Freed US hikers spend 1st day of freedom secluded with kin

MUSCAT, Oman — Two Americans released from an Iranian prison were spending their first full day of freedom Thursday in seclusion with their families, after more than two years in custody accused as spies.

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Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer arrived Wednesday in Oman under a $1 million bail-for-freedom deal and were embraced by relatives. Also on hand was Sarah Shourd, who was freed by Iran last year.

It was a joyful reunion in the Gulf state of Oman and the families called it "the best day of our lives." President Barack Obama said the men's release was "wonderful news."

The three were detained in July 2009 along the Iran-Iraq border. They maintained their innocence, saying they were only hiking in Iraq's relatively peaceful Kurdish region and might have accidentally wandered into Iran. Last month, Fattal and Bauer were sentenced to eight years in prison each for illegal entry into Iran and espionage.

American and Omani officials did not disclose details on Thursday about the Americans' plans and when they may head home. After Shourd was freed last September, she stayed for days in Oman before she flew to United States.

Iran's Foreign Ministry said in a statement Thursday that the pair's release was a gesture of Islamic mercy and a response to calls for their freedom by world leaders such as U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Oman's ruler, Sultan Qaboos bin Said.

Complicated maneuvers
Wednesday's release capped complicated diplomatic maneuvers over a week of confusing signals by Iran's leadership. Although the fate of Fattal and Bauer gripped America, it was on the periphery of the larger showdowns between Washington and Tehran that include Iran's nuclear program and its ambitions to widen military and political influence in the Middle East and beyond

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