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On March 18, 2008, Steve Jobs was deposed by the SEC during its investigation of Apple’s stock option backdating scandal. The deposition was never made public until Forbes published it on Friday, after obtaining it through a Freedom of Information Act request. (Full deposition embedded below)

Jobs explains his reasoning for why he asked the board for mega grants of options for both himself and his top executives, but claims ignorance of the mechanics of how that was done after the board approved the grants themselves. (It was the falsifying of board minutes for a meeting that never occurred, not the backdating per se, that got Apple’s former general counsel Nancy Heinen into hot water with the SEC—this deposition was for a case against her). There aren’t too many revelations on the legal front in the document.

But the document provides the first detailed account of the incident from Steve Jobs himself in his own words. What comes through in the deposition is how Jobs sees himself and his’ fierce loyalty to those who work for him. For instance, after selling NeXt to Apple in 1997, his initial reason for acting as a consultant was to get “some of the NeXt people into some jobs where they could help Apple.” He himself was reluctant at first to take on the CEO role at Apple because he didn’t want the people at his other company, Pixar, to “think I was abandoning them.”

Then when it came time to reward his “ultra key” executives with one million options each, two of them were from NeXT. While he was taking care of his top lieutenants by trying ti “surprise and delight them with what a career at Apple could be”, he was “hurt” that Apple’s board didn’t do the same for him. So he had to have a little talk with them about swapping his 20 million then-underwater options for 7.5 million new ones, which they did.

I’ve excerpted some of the juicier bits from the deposition after the jump.

Just how big a task does MySpace’s freshly appointed CEO Owen Van Natta have in front of him? Let’s take a quick peek at the latest global traffic stats from comScore which just came out today. On a global basis, Facebook attracted more than twice as many visitors in the month of March as arch-rival MySpace.

Facebook had an estimated 294.7 million unique visitors in March, 2009 on a worldwide basis, compared to 125.7 million for MySpace. While Facebook gained 19 million visitors during the month, MySpace gained only 2 million. In terms of pageviews, MySpace has seen a drop of 20 percent since January (to 37.9 billion), whereas Facebook has seen growth of 22 percent in the exact opposite direction (to 87.3 billion). And while MySpace is still bigger in the U.S., Facebook is closing that gap fast.

The Cloud is looming large, offering us ways to store and share our data in ways that were never before possible. We can effortlessly share our documents and photos with our families and friends, while maintaining control over their spread using powerful granular privacy controls. But it’s quickly becoming clear that the cloud isn’t ready for us. Because the services we rely on are letting us down with a frequency that is simply unacceptable.

I’ve been putting this post off for a while, mostly because I didn’t want to point to a single breach and call it a trend. But in only the last two months, we’ve covered at least three major web services that suffered security lapses tied to software bugs or scaling issues. In our posts covering these problems, one of our commentors will inevitably say something along the lines of, “that’s what you get for uploading your data to X service“. And the more problems I see, the more I’m beginning to agree with them.

For a recap, let’s revisit some of the problems we’ve recently seen.
In March I wrote about a bug in Google Docs that would share your files with people whom you’d never given access to. Granted, it would only share these files with contacts you’d previously interacted with, and not the entire world, but this did little to ameliorate the issue - in some cases it would be better to share a supposedly private document with a stranger than a coworker.

The week before the Kutcher/CNN race, Kutcher’s Twitter page got about 176,000 pageviews, according to numbers provided to us by Compete. Last week, his pageviews rose to an incredible 3.2 million — yes, that is just for his Twitter profile page. In the same time span, CNNbrk (the account racing Kutcher) went from 61,000 pageviews to over 900,000. And Oprah, the latecomer, went from 5,000 pageviews (before she ran the account), to over 980,000 — which is perhaps even more incredible considering she made her debut on Friday of last week.

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Over the past few days, actor Ashton Kutcher has been racing CNN to be the first Twitter user with a million followers. Kutcher and other parties like EA have been pulling out all the stops to help his account gain followers as quickly as possible to hit the number. Clearly, this is a game — and really

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Facebook today announced the preliminary results of the site governance vote; an important step in the history of Facebook in which the users were called to vote on the site’s future terms of use. The results aren’t fully processed yet, but approximately 74.4 percent of users voted for the new Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities over the existing Terms of Use.

The incident that kickstarted this initiative was the sudden change in Facebook’s Terms of Use (later reverted) under which all of the content you’ve ever uploaded was Facebook’s to be used in whatever way they want, even if you quit Facebook altogether.

Over 600,000 users participated in the vote. Facebook has around 200,000,000 active users, which means that only 0.3% voted; a very small number if you compare it to, for example, the US presidential elections of 2008, where the overall turnout was 61.6%. Obviously, only a small fraction of Facebook users take the service seriously enough to actively participate in its governance, even if it only takes a couple of seconds to vote.

What does all this mean? Well, the proposed new document should now become Facebook’s new Terms of Use. From the official blog: “Assuming the auditors confirm the preliminary vote result in favor of the proposed documents, we’ll be adopting the Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities as the governing documents for the Facebook site.” Facebook believes that now they can put an end to the Terms of Use turmoil. As Ted Ullyot says on the official Facebook blog, they “strongly believe that our proposed documents satisfied the concerns raised in February.”

It’s not that simple, though. What Facebook did here is offer two choices; what if you liked neither? The new document was created based on the “comments from users and experts received during the 30-day comment period.” Taking comments into consideration is nice; but Facebook had the last word in the actual creation of the document.

Perhaps this entire talk about the democratic process on a social network seems silly, but once you go that way, why not go all the way? A modern democracy has a lot of tools that are supposed to make sure that the will of the majority really gets carried out; perhaps as a next step in its journey towards a real democracy (assuming that’s what Facebook wants) they should consider voting for representatives from the user base, creating a board that will actively participate in the creation of governing documents for the site.

What do you think? Does Facebook really needs to be a democracy? Was setting up a vote for the new Terms of Use enough, or should users have been able to actively participate in its creation? Please speak your mind in the comments.

Reviews: Facebook

Tags: democracy, facebook, terms of use, voting

“The new site is promising to help young people cut through the clutter by providing hospital and extras health insurance cover online for just $9.90 a week via PayPal. It features numerous Web 2.0 style innovations that should resonate with the attention poor video centric Generation Y. The site is also carbon offset. Visitors will discover virtual avatars, Skype, Twitter, health Widgets and live video. An Apple iPhone can also be won to highlight the fact the site is also iPhone friendly” said Jonathan Crabtree, Online Manager, Strategy & Innovation for GMHBA Health Insurance.

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