Mark Zuckerberg must read NEWSWEEK. For months now, Techtonic Shifts has implored him to open up the social graph—the Facebook data that describe our friendships, tastes, and more—and share it with the world. Back in February, we wrote, "If competition breeds innovation, closed systems kill it . . . Today, there's no war over who can better mine the social graph. That's because Facebook holds the only key, and for now, we're all locked inside." 
 
 Facebook still holds the key, but yesterday it swung the door wide open. At the annual f8 conference for outside developers, CEO Zuckerberg took the stage to announce some game-changing new technologies. The first is the Web-wide "like" button. Now, when someone visits any one of hundreds of sites ranging from CNN to IMDb, he can "like" a piece of content there. That connection is automatically, intelligently integrated into your Facebook profile—if you like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Facebook understands that that's a movie, and automatically adds it to your list of favorite films. This is Facebook-as-magpie, a crowded nest to house every possible scrap of social information about its users, even if it's coming from elsewhere on the Web. 
 
 The second and more important technology is the "open graph." For the first time, outside developers can get a good look at the Facebook social graph, and use it on their own sites. In practice, that means when you go to CNN.com, CNN can show you a list of articles that have been "liked" by your friends—even if you've never been to CNN.com before, let alone created an account and signed in there. 
 
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 This is the most ambitious thing to happen on the Web in a long, long time. The coverage has been breathless. A TechCrunch post carried the headline "I Think Facebook Just Seized Control of the Internet." Slate's technology writer, Farhad Manjoo, declared that "Facebook is basically going to be the Web." 
 
 The implications are enormous, and Twitter, for one, should be very, very scared. During his keynote, Zuckerberg seemed to take a dismissive swipe at the micromessaging service and its ceaseless "stream" of tweets: 
 
 
 
 The stream is ephemeral. You post something to the stream, and it's there for a few hours, and some people will see it, and then it mostly floats away. And the services that consume the stream, they don't actually form a connection between you and that restaurant, they don't actually understand the semantic relationship that exists between you and what you're connecting to. 
 
 
 
 Facebook is now going to create and store that "semantic relationship," which is both great and terrifying. Computer scientists have long envisioned a Web 3.0, a smarter Internet that understands the difference between objects, people, places, animals, etc. In other words, computers and servers should know thatis an object, and in particular it's a film, and in particular a film by Michel Gondry, who is a person. Right now computers see words like "Michel Gondry" only as dumb, meaningless text. Facebook wants to change that—which is great. But it also plans to own that information—which is scary. As Web guru Dave Winer puts it , "Facebook is to be the identity system for the web. A company? That just can't work . . . Even Bill Gates didn't have the audacity to propose that!" Gates may not have it, but Zuckerberg certainly does. ||||| Ryan Tate — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken some fierce criticism for compromising his users' privacy. Today he issued a clever response, taking the primordial tendency of humans to form groups and rolling it into his product as a feature. 
 
 At a press conference and in a blog post titled "Giving You More Control," Zuckerberg rolled out two big new features, both clearly designed to assuage criticism from Facebook users that the site doesn't offer users enough control over the privacy, makes privacy settings too hard to navigate and even cynically manipulates settings to advance its own interests. 
 
 One, a simple exporter, allows users to download "everything you've ever posted on Facebook and all your correspondences with friends," although it doesn't sound like the downloader will export your actual list of Facebook friends or their public contact information, a feature that would be crucial in allowing people to move to other social networks. 
 
 The other, bigger new feature is a new version of Facebook's groups functionality, one that lets people segregate their conversations more easily, keeping, say, relatives from seeing pictures meant for a wild group of friends, or church pals from seeing a political rant intended for like minded campaign volunteers. Where Facebook's old groups system was cumbersome to set up and bereft of functionality, the new one is designed to be used in an ad hoc and flexible manner. Groups can be "open," with membership and posts made public; "closed," with membership public but communications kept private; or "secret," with both membership and content walled off. Groups feature live group chat, a shared wal and an optional email list. Friends can easily be added with one mouse click (there seems to be no process of having to invite members or accept invitations). 
 
 Wrote Zuckerberg: 
 
 We approached this problem as primarily a social one. Rather than asking all of you to classify how you know all of your friends, or programming machines to guess which sets of people are likely cohorts, we're offering something that's as simple as inviting your best friends over for dinner. 
 
 Facebook's new groups have already been compared to real-world in-groups and clubs. "This is the high school cafeteria clique model of human interaction," wrote former Google social networking staffer Kevin Marks. CNET's Caroline McCarthy predicted they'd become a new hub for the social maneuvering and humiliations of junior high school. 
 
 That's exactly right, but not a knock. For all the privacy they've taken from users — and they've taken plenty — it's nice to see that Zuckerberg and his team have come up with at least one good way of helping users take some of it back. Facebook's new groups feature is fairly basic. In fact, at its essential core it's downright primitive, drawing on one of the most basic of human instincts. And that's exactly why it will be such an effective tool. 
 
 For more from the announcement, see Gizmodo's detailed coverage. 
 
 [Photo of Zuckerberg with two Facebook employees at today's announcement. Getty Images.] ||||| Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg and other executives planned to field questions from employees Thursday afternoon amid growing criticism of how the popular social networking site treats the personal information of its more than 400 million users. 
 
 Facebook downplayed the all-hands meeting, saying it would not be making any changes to new features announced three weeks ago that some say invade their privacy. 
 
 The meeting comes as lawmakers, privacy watchdogs and technology pundits take issue with new features that were automatically rolled out without users' explicit consent. 
 
 Last week, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and 14 other consumer groups filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. This week, the European Union also took issue with the new features. Charts tracking the erosion of privacy on Facebook have been posted. Technology pundits and bloggers have offered their opinions; some have warned that Facebook may be risking damage to its brand. 
 
 Some prominent bloggers have “deactivated,” or deleted, their Facebook accounts. On Wednesday’s episode of “This Week in Google,” host Leo Laporte said he searched WikiHow to figure out how to delete his account. Searchengineland.com editor Danny Sullivan said that traffic to WikiHow had exploded and that Google searches for “how do I delete my facebook account” had soared. 
 
 "That's it. It's gone," Laporte said during the show. "And I think that's the right thing to do." 
 
 Facebook has argued that it is giving users more control over their privacy not less. And it’s looking to beef up its presence in Washington to defend its privacy practices to Congress and federal regulators. 
 
 Privacy issues have been a recurrent problem. A 2007 feature called Beacon, which published Facebook users' activity at other websites in their Facebook news feeds, triggered such a strong backlash that the company scrapped it. Last year the company faced another controversy when it changed privacy settings to make some information publicly available. 
 
 Yet Facebook remains the Web’s hottest property, challenging Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. for consumers’ attention and advertising dollars. And that’s what has helped fuel this firestorm. The company has a massive treasure chest of user information that could be very valuable to advertisers. 
 
 Some see Facebook's new features as a stepping stone to pushing users to make more of that data readily available. 
 
 One feature is a “Like” button that publishers install on their websites to allow people to more easily share content with their Facebook friends. The “Like” feature is public, so others can see what users liked. 
 
 The more controversial feature is called instant personalization, a pilot program with three partner websites in which Facebook automatically sends information to the sites about the user so they can tailor content to the user’s interests. 
 
 Facebook is expected to unveil a new feature that users would use to reveal their location in status updates. 
 
 -- Jessica Guynn 
 
 Photo: Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg. Credit: Paul Sakuma / Associated Press
– Facebook held a major press event today, but kept the media guessing about what it would be unveiling. The answer was what Mark Zuckerberg described as the "third pillar" of Facebook: Graph Search. Basically, the idea is to allow people to search for people, places, and things to do through their networks, the official announcement explains. For example, if you were trying to set up a Game of Thrones viewing party, you might search for "friends in [your town] who like Game of Thrones." Going out? Search "movies my friends like." Dating? Search "friends of friends in [your town] who are single." The system will be "privacy aware," Zuckerberg said, so "you can only search for content that has been shared with you." It will also integrate Bing results, broadening the kind of information it can find—though at one point Zuckerberg added that he "would love to work with Google." The system is being rolled out as a limited beta release starting today. Right now, Zuckerberg says there are no plans to monetize the feature, though he said it "could potentially be a business over time." Some instant reactions: Farhad Manjoo: "This is the most natural-language search I've ever seen. It's a completely different paradigm from searching Google. Phrases, not keywords." Mike Isaac: "Google built web search first, then tried to slap Google+ on top of it for personalization. Facebook taking the backwards approach." (See more from Isaac here.) Henry Blodget: "I don't see how Facebook cashes in with this thing. Search could coin it for them. This, as executed, is just another feature." The stock market: Shortly after the rollout, Facebook's stock was down 2%, according to the Wall Street Journal.