Facebook’s growth does not appear to be slowing by any means. Appearing for an interview on the Today show in a bold red tie earlier today, Mark Zuckerberg told Matt Lauer that the site is growing by more than 5 million users a week globally and more than one million a week in the United States. This is unprecedented growth for the social network which now attracts over 10 percent of the global internet population to its site.
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Late last week the Consumerist wrote an article highlighting a woman who had trouble convincing Facebook to remove the profile of her deceased brother. William Bemister, the brother of Stephanie Bermister, died suddenly last November. Stephanie’s case in particular brings up several important issues regarding Facebook, it’s policy towards deceased users, and the way in which it deals with family members of the deceased.

Per Facebook’s policy, his profile was memorialized, a process by which certain private information is removed and the page is only accessible to confirmed friends through search. The problem in Stephanie’s case was that she was not yet a confirmed friend. After Stephanie sent in a request along with a copy of William’s death certificate to Facebook for removing William’s profile completely, Facebook still did not remove the profile.
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Facebook has announced that they will be partnering with DEMO for live coverage of the event starting Monday morning in San Francisco. There will be a live video feed included with Facebook’s Live Feed widget and a “DEMOChatter” widget which includes live Twitter updates that are taking place around the event. For those not aware of what DEMO is, it’s essentially the competing conference to the Techcrunch50 except that startups pay to present.
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This evening I attended the fourth D.C. Techcocktail and when I returned I logged into Facebook and an entire album of photos from the night had already been uploaded and tagged appropriately. What I also noticed was a new feature that I hadn’t seen before: the ability to see what other users were tagged within that album. The feature also lets you view the specific photos that any individual has been tagged in.

It’s a small change but for Facebook it’s a huge upgrade given that they are currently the most popular photo sharing site on the web. Facebook rarely makes large upgrades to their site but minor ones like this can make all the difference. If you went to an event, it’s frequent that multiple photos will show up in an album but it’s difficult to single out an individual within the album.
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We are covering the call with Facebook live and on the call now are Elliot Schrage of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. We’ll post updates below.

Mark Zuckerberg: Today we’re going to discuss the new governing documents of Facebook. As the service grows to 175 million users, openness is not an end state but it’s also a process. It’s a framework of how we want to think about it and move forward with it. We took last week as a strong signal of how people wanted to be involved in the governing process. These are the foundational policies that we are putting in place for the site going forward. We’ll talk today about policy and not about product.

There will be hundreds and thousands of product changes over time but this call is just to discuss how we’ll be moving forward. There are new mechanisms for user involvement in modifying documents. If we want the world to be more open and transparent then having an open process is the only way to do that.

We want to be clear that we do not own user data and we feel bad that we gave this impression. Now we are going to open up for more questions.
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Today at 2pm EST/11 AM PST, Mark Zuckerberg will be announcing “new steps Facebook is taking to improve user understanding and ownership of the Facebook terms of service and, more generally, the policies of the Facebook service.” This is in response to last weeks uproar over the changes in Facebook terms of service which had to do primarily with the ownership of content and protections that users have on the site.

We will of course be covering the event live so check in later today to hear Facebook’s new announcements related to the terms of service.

Over the weekend I wrote about the new “Error Check System” application that was running rampant. A new application is now making the rounds less then a week later. I’ve received numerous emails this morning reporting the issue. The application is called “f a c e b o o k - - closing down!!!” and it automatically sends out a notice to all of your friends saying that you reported them for violating their terms of service.
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Over the past two days I slowed down my blog volume to do something I hadn’t done in a while: program an application for Twitter. My programming knowledge often becomes more of a hinderance than a benefit. The reason is that I come up with ideas so often that I occasionally start to program the idea without thinking it through. Being an idea person is good if you can’t program but when you can program it can become a burden pretty quickly.

I’m not a software engineer but I know enough to be dangerous. This isn’t about me programming though. It’s about the gut reaction that took place two days ago. The great idea that I had at 2 AM was about a Twitter application, not a Facebook app. Yes, I have a few big ideas about Facebook applications as well but I’ve been increasingly considering developing apps for Twitter.
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Being a traveling foodie can be a really fun job, especially if you’re Anthony Bourdain and you have your own show on the Travel Channel. But for the rest of us, the cable channel’s new Facebook app will have to suffice. The new application is called “No Reservations: Hungry For More.” This is a fitting title because the application itself essentially combines Bourdain’s own content with user-generated content.

As a user of this application you can create your own style reviews. Text, photos and video media can all be incorporated into each review, which are all powered through a pop-up Kyte widget. You’re also able to read and rate reviews from other users that have added the “No Reservations” application.
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For the past 5 years administrators of Facebook groups have not been able to change their names. As of today, that restriction is being removed amidst continued feedback from group admins who want the ability to do so. While it’s a seemingly small adjustment, it makes me wonder if we could soon see a mini-market for larger groups. At one point, having a large group was worth a large amount until the company place restrictions on the number of people you could message.
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