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The Netscape founder is currently at the helm of his own social-networking site, Ning, which lets Web users create their own branded community sites without technical expertise. Because of its focus on niche communities rather than mass communication, it’s not a direct Facebook competitor.

Facebook has asked tech veteran Marc Andreessen to join its board of directors, according to Kara Swisher at All Things D. The deal isn’t finalized, apparently, but Andreessen has “verbally agreed” to the commitment.

Facebook, meanwhile, has been padding its ranks with seasoned industry leaders as a means of competing with the Valley’s biggest names. Google sales executive Sheryl Sandberg was brought on recently as chief operating officer, and this week it was announced that Google communications czar Elliot Schrage would be making the jump to Facebook as well.

Current Facebook board members include Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer and PayPal co-founder and Founders Fund investor Peter Thiel.

Though pricing may change, on Friday afternoon, TheNerds.net listed more than 1,000 Phenom X3 8750 (2.4GHz) processors in stock at a price of $218.99. Newegg listed the same processor at $195.

Currently, AMD offers
the X3 8400, 8600, and 8700. These are so-called “B2″ versions of the processor that contain an extremely rare “TLB” bug. AMD will update this series with a B3 version that fixes the bug in silicon.

During AMD’s first-quarter earnings conference call, AMD chief financial officer, Robert J. Rivet, said that the B3 version of the triple-core Phenom should contribute to AMD’s bottom line in the second quarter. Rivet said he expects improvement as AMD continues “to increase the lineup of Phenoms available. (The) quad-core architecture that we also use for triple-core will have good benefit right away,” he said.

Consumer systems from Hewlett-Packard and Gateway that use the Phenom X3 8400 are on the market today. These desktops are available at Best Buy for as little as $550.

He also noted that AMD’s processor and graphics lineup is consumer-centric. “The wild card issue is the environment we’re in…in the consumer space, which is the world we play in mostly.”

The Phenom X3, when paired with the 780 series chipset, can provide a “full HD experience” and, with the AMD Unified Video Decoder (UVD), can process HD playback on the graphics processing unit (GPU) rather than the CPU, AMD said.

Advanced Micro Devices will refresh its triple-core X3 processor lineup with versions that fix an outstanding bug. A number of online resellers already list the upcoming processors.

AMD Phenom X3 logo

A number of resellers already list the Phenom X3 processors as the 8450, 8650, and 8750. The “50″ suffix indicates that the bug fix is integrated into the chip.

(Credit:
AMD)

Despite that, not even that many Mac users find the service valuable. Apple’s installed base was estimated at around 23 million users last October. If all those users were paying $99 a year for .Mac (which is impossible, since some percentage of those users are still on Mac OS X 10.3, not supported by .Mac), Apple would add around $2 billion in revenue a year. The entire “Software, Service, and other sales” category that includes .Mac revenue accounted for $529 million of Apple’s $7.5 billion in revenue during its most recent quarter, and Leopard upgrades had to count for a healthy portion of that.

If you’re buying a computer to get onto the Internet, don’t you think you’d be interested in a service that makes that computer much easier to use with the Internet?

Grocery stores sell basic items like tuna fish and bread at razor-thin margins, because they know people are likely to pick up a few other things while they’re at the market for the basics. Apple has an opportunity to do the same thing with .Mac, and it won’t have to give away the store to make it happen.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs explains how the iLife software is designed to work with .Mac at an event last year.

Of course, Apple’s financial performance isn’t exactly hurting these days, so it’s not like .Mac is a huge drain on the company. But the company is letting price get in the way of a service that could be a unique selling point for its hardware: the real profit engine at Apple.

(Credit:
Apple)

The value in .Mac only comes into play if you’re a
Mac user, since the tight integration with the iLife suite of software found in every Mac is the key pitch for the service. Sure, you could cobble together a suite of similar Internet services for maybe $40 or $50 a year and just run them through your browser, but if you’re going to use iPhoto and iWeb anyway, why bother?

At $99 a year, there aren't a lot of takers for Apple's .Mac online service.

For example, you can always share your photos with the world via Flickr by uploading them from your Mac’s hard drive, but you can publish them to your .Mac Web Gallery with a single click inside iPhoto after importing them from your camera. Or, you can pull your .Mac Web Galleries right into a Web page created with iWeb, rather than pulling the files individually from your hard drive.

Or, Apple could give away a free year of .Mac service with the purchase of a new Mac. That’s the drug-dealer strategy: the first one is free. After that, once you’ve put all your images and videos on the .Mac service, $49 a year won’t seem like much to keep that service running. Apple does provide a 60-day trial period for .Mac services, but that’s not enough to get hooked.

Apple has designed .Mac to work very closely with its Macs, and updated it last year with additional storage and hooks into the latest version of iLife. But Apple charges far more than competing online services, which offer many of the same services for free or for a nominal charge. Combined with the fact that Apple is not an Internet brand, and it’s not surprising that .Mac is an afterthought.

Apple could turn .Mac into a real selling point for its hardware if it cut the price in half to $49–about what it would cost to maintain a pro Flickr account and 10GBs of file storage with Google–and improved the capabilities.

For example, if $49 a year granted you access to 20GBs of online storage, unlimited photo sharing on a Web page you designed, and unique capabilities such as Back to My Mac, you might be more willing to pay the equivalent of four bucks a month. Use the same service to link iPhones and
iPod Touches with Macs, and you increase the value of each device, while also giving users a reason to buy both their handheld and desk-bound computers from Apple.

Over the last five years, people have grown more accustomed to storing personal photos, documents, and files in the “cloud,” rather than on a hard drive in their home. At the same time, they are buying Apple’s Macs in larger numbers than ever. The company’s answer to this trend has been its .Mac service, a $99-a-year collection of online tools released in 2002 featuring 10GBs of file storage, Web site hosting, and photo sharing, among other things.

A free .Mac service could be nothing more than a loss leader designed to sell Macs and iPhones. Apple clearly isn’t making a ton of money anyway on .Mac, so the incremental revenue lost by making the service free might not even be noticed if that free service is used to sell Macs in greater numbers. A mass of online .Mac users could also have any number of implications inside the social-networking or content-delivery industries, such as free downloads for .Mac customers who visit the iTunes Store or more sophisticated online user forums and communities.

Might it make .Mac free, as suggested by Silicon Alley Insider’s Dan Frommer a few weeks ago? The three major Internet players of our time–Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft–offer basic services for free. And for nominal fees, they offer almost the same amount of storage and sharing abilities as .Mac, such as Flickr’s $24.95-a-year deal for unlimited uploads of photos, or Google’s 10GBs of storage for $20.

Viewed on just the features alone, $99 a year is hard to justify for the .Mac service. 10GBs of storage? I can get that for $20 from Google, and I can get much more if I want it. Photo sharing? I can do that for free on Flickr, and upload as many photos and videos as I want for $24.95 a year. Build my own Web site? Lots of services offer that capability for free.

Apple has always tried to sell its products as models of integrated design, where the software is designed to work with specific hardware to promote reliability and stability. It has extended that philosophy to the third leg of the modern computing experience–the Internet–but it continues to deter people from using .Mac with a high price tag.

Apple is clearly managing to convince more computer buyers than ever that Macs are a compelling option, but it’s failing to persuade those same buyers that .Mac is worth $99 a year. The company is missing out on two converging trends–a life spent online and surging Mac sales–to use .Mac as a selling point for the Mac, or to get the increasing number of Mac users onto the .Mac service and therefore transformed into a recurring source of revenue.

But the art of business–even in a Web 2.0-gone-mad world–has not yet evolved to the point where giving your product away for free always makes sense. Maintaining a storage and networking facility costs real money. And why give something away for free when people are willing to pay something–if not $99 a year–for a service?

It’s not just about Macs, either. Storage space on devices like the iPhone or iPod Touch will be constrained for a while as we wait for the flash memory industry to continue packing more bits of storage into every chip. If you’ve got a ubiquitous, fast broadband connection–such as 3G and its eventual successors–cloud storage makes more and more sense. People always want more storage, and one way to satisfy those needs–and encourage more downloads from the iTunes Store–would be to ensure that potential customers will have enough storage for all their music and video with a free storage service that is also accessible from your Mac.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET News.com)

Facebook representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Just when you thought the landscape of social-networking developer APIs couldn’t get any more complicated, here comes another curveball.

Facebook announced earlier this month that it would be evolving its developer API into “Facebook Connect,” a way to sync Facebook accounts with other sites like Digg. The announcement came within days of MySpace’s “Data Availability” and Google’s “Friend Connect,” a set of new projects hinting that social-networking properties aren’t just going to be standalone sites anymore.

Facebook will reportedly open-source the code for its application platform, according to TechCrunch. The announcement may be just days away.

Facebook’s image in the eyes of the “open Web” community also took a hit when popular blogger Robert Scoble said his account had been banned when he tried to export his Facebook contacts to Plaxo.

Facebook, however, has shown signs of wanting to expand its code beyond its own platform: Bebo, the social network that was acquired by AOL earlier this year, has a platform that accepts Facebook applications in addition to OpenSocial ones, and it seems logical that this would eventually reach sites other than Bebo.

It makes sense to do it now: the Facebook Platform just hit its one-year anniversary, and while it remains extraordinarily popular, developers have found an alternative in OpenSocial. Created by Google and then spun off into a nonprofit organization, OpenSocial is an open-source developer standard that any participating social site can use. Most of the big players in the scene, including MySpace, LinkedIn, and Google’s Orkut, are on board–but not Facebook.

But the question remains, especially given the scant detail of the latest rumor, about whether “open source” means truly open source or some variety of “extensible.” Facebook has been redefining a whole lot of what we think about the Web, so this may be no exception.

Most navigation systems with traffic-monitoring capabilities make you pay an extra $60 or so per year for the service. Not so the Navigon 5100: Its real-time traffic features are included subscription-free. Right now, Buy.com has the Navigon 5100 (refurbished) for just $129.99 shipped.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

(Credit:
Navigon)

CNET dinged the Navigon 5100 for its smallish screen (3.5 inches) and unusual dashboard mount. But the 20 user reviews at Buy.com averaged 4.5 stars out of 5. I think my sole complaint is with the 90-day warranty, but that’s pretty typical for a refurbished unit. And, let’s face it, $130 for a GPS with lifetime traffic is unheard of. Get one while you can.

That’s a decidedly entry-level price for a GPS, but this model goes way beyond entry-level features. In addition to the traffic service, which will advise you of trouble spots and suggest alternate routes, the Navigon offers text-to-speech capabilities (it announces actual street names) and a lane-assistant function that recommends the best lane to be in for your route.

Its Reality View presents a photo-realistic image of complex highway interchanges, with actual road signage and exit-ramp guidance.

Canonical had to do a difficult balancing act, but I think Mark Shuttleworth and crew chose the right path. Offering a safe, legal way to include proprietary media codecs is the right thing to do in the short term for Ubuntu. Perhaps those codecs can be opened up in the future, but that’s not for Canonical to take upon itself, not alone, anyway.

While I am sympathetic with the intent of such commentary, OStatic is absolutely correct to suggest that Canonical’s decision to set up a for-fee way to add proprietary media codecs to Ubuntu is spot-on:

They could have taken the approach that every last Ubuntu user is vested in the “free as in speech” aspect of open source and does not own a single piece of media in a proprietary format. That would have been seen through immediately as either a blatant lie or delusional thinking. Or they could have thumbed their noses at the intellectual property laws in several countries, and refused to offer a legal alternative on the grounds that the laws are simply restrictive and misguided.

OStatic provides an excellent analysis of the dilemma facing Canonical and its Ubuntu distribution: to facilitate adoption of proprietary media codecs and, if so, how?

I have (incorrectly) criticized Canonical for including proprietary codecs in Ubuntu before, but others in the open-source world have been far more derogatory about any possible hint of proprietary software making its way into Ubuntu.

commentary

The laws are misguided. They are restrictive. They are still legally binding, though, and it is not Canonical’s call to encourage (or require) that any Linux user violate them. For this reason, Canonical is doing the right thing in offering a legal alternative.

Applications that can be downloaded to the phone, such as maps, have helped drive the growth in using mobile devices to access news and information, Donovan noted in the report. And text-based searches have also contributed to the rise in popularity of accessing news and information via a phone.

(Credit:
comScore Inc.)

This category grew more than four-fold to 9.3 million daily mobile unique users, according to the report.

“Over the course of the past year, we have seen use of mobile Internet evolve from an occasional activity to being a daily part of their lives,” Mark Donovan, comScore’s senior vice president of mobile, said in a statement. “This underscores the growing importance of the mobile medium as consumers become more reliant on their mobile devices to access time-sensitive and utilitarian information.”

According to a report released Monday by market researcher comScore, the number of U.S. residents using mobile devices to access news and information more than doubled to 63.2 million in January over the previous year.

Mobile devices are becoming the virtual newspaper.

In the U.S., the number of unique mobile phone users who access news and information on a daily business has grown to 22.4 million in January over the previous year. And here’s a look at how the categories stack up on a daily usage basis:

While news and information accounted for the largest slice of mobile Internet users in January, social networking or blogging grew at an even greater rate, according to comScore.

If you’ve got several Gmail accounts and are frequently having to juggle signatures for each of them, worth downloading is Blank Canvas’ Gmail Signatures. This experimental
Firefox extension will drop in one of four custom HTML signatures based on whichever account you’re sending the message from. If you’re like me and have two or more accounts, setting this up is a big time saver.

It’s worth noting you cannot get at your custom signatures on browsers without the extension installed (even if it’s the same machine), and this will not change existing Gmail signature settings. This means that any Gmail-specific signature you have will still show up, however, they’ll appear underneath the one from the extension.

Pick out custom HTML signatures for Gmail, and get them to change based on what e-mail address you're sending them from.

Gmail Signatures is an experimental add-on, and as such you must be registered with Mozilla’s Firefox add-ons site to download it.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Once installed, you get a new drop-down menu that lets you select one of your four custom signatures. These can be managed directly within Gmail, and come with an editor that shows you a live preview of whatever HTML you drop in. Included are four presets with nicknames like personal, business, and family, all of which can be renamed to suit the type of signature you’ve set up.

Microsoft details app store plans

‘Silent Drum’ makes noise at music competition

Google crowdsources maps directions, too

AMD: MacBook issues giving graphics bad rap

Selected Flickr images now sold through Getty

Apple shrinks its iPod Shuffle

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Today’s stories:

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Apple overhauls the iPod Shuffle with new features and more storage in an even smaller case. Reporter Tom Krazit stops by the podcast studio to talk about where the Shuffle fits into Apple’s lineup. Also in this podcast: Google is opening up its Map Maker tool so people can make maps and directions more accurate. At the same time, a California politician wants to blur parts of Google Maps out in the name of national security. And AMD says the problems some users are having with their new MacBooks shouldn’t taint the entire graphics chip industry.

For The New York Times, the digital future is now

Calif. lawmaker wants to blur Google Earth

“Apple was among the first California companies to offer equal rights and benefits to our employees’ same-sex partners, and we strongly believe that a person’s fundamental rights–including the right to marry–should not be affected by their sexual orientation. Apple views this as a civil rights issue, rather than just a political issue, and is therefore speaking out publicly against Proposition 8,” the company said in a statement posted to the Hot News section of its Web site.

Apple has joined Google in publicly opposing a California ballot initiative that would deny marriage rights to same-sex couples.

The company announced Friday that it would donate $100,000 to the No on Prop 8 campaign, which opposes a measure to ban gay marriage that California voters will consider a week from Tuesday. Google has also spoken out against the ballot measure.