Webby News

A couple days ago, I wrote a post wondering if it wasn’t time to change Facebook’s social graph dynamic? Specifically, I called for a simplified system that had two layers: your friends and your followers. I think that their current social management system which relies heavily on friend lists is highly flawed. And guess what? Mark Zuckerberg agrees.

Tonight at a Facebook Developer’s Garage meeting at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Zuckerberg fielded a question about the service’s privacy controls. He said that the ideal solution for sharing different things with different people is to make a friend list. “But guess what? Nobody wants to make lists,” Zuckerberg admitted.

The bidding war continues.

Dell announced today that 3PAR has accepted its increased offer to acquire the storage leader for $27 per share in cash, or approximately $1.8 billion.

Dell had previously signed an agreement to acquire 3PAR for $18 per share or $1.13 billion, with a provision for matching competing bids.

HP then effectively outbid the company and offered $1.6 billion, but Dell matched that offer yesterday, after which HP made a renewed bid for - you guessed it - $1.8 billion.

Remember Diaspora? You’ll be forgiven if you don’t. Since they received a lot of hype as the open-source “Facebook Alternative” this past May, they’ve been quiet. In fact, they hadn’t given any updates on their progress since early July. But today they’ve re-emerged with some updates. Notably, they say: “We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th.” That’s just three weeks away.

That’s good news. But even though it has only been three months since the initial buzz began about the project, the online world has slightly changed. Back then, it seemed as if everyone with a voice on the web was screaming bloody murder about Facebook and their privacy issues. That plus a timely New York Times profile helped Diaspora raise over $200,000 from the crowd-sourced fundraising site Kickstarter — the most ever raised on the site and an amazing $190,000 more than Diaspora’s original goal. But today, again, just three months later, Facebook is still growing like a weed. Controversy keeps bubbling up, but it just as quickly subsides.

href="http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/facebook-painted.jpg"> target="_blank" href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http://mashable.com/2010/08/26/business-facebook-page/&service=bit.ly"> target="_blank" class='feedflare' href="http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=http://mashable.com/2010/08/26/business-facebook-page/&title=HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Your Business Facebook Page&srcTitle=Mashable&srcUrl=http://mashable.com"> target="_blank" share_url="http://mashable.com/2010/08/26/business-facebook-page/" type="box_count" name="fb_share" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://mashable.com/2010/08/26/business-facebook-page/&src=sp" style="text-decoration: none;"> href="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis/login?url=http://mashable.com/2010/08/26/business-facebook-page/&title=HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Your Business Facebook Page&related=true&style=true">Susan Payton is the President of href="http://www.eggmarketingpr.com/" target="_blank">Egg Marketing & Public Relations, an Internet marketing firm. She blogs at href="http://www.sparkplugging.com/marketing" target="_blank">The Marketing Eggspert Blog. Follow her on Twitter href="http://www.twitter.com/eggmarketing" target="_blank">@eggmarketing.

So you paid attention to what everyone…

target="_blank" href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http://mashable.com/2010/08/27/google-million-calls/&service=bit.ly"> target="_blank" class='feedflare' href="http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=http://mashable.com/2010/08/27/google-million-calls/&title=One Million Calls Placed From Gmail in 24 Hours&srcTitle=Mashable&srcUrl=http://mashable.com"> target="_blank" share_url="http://mashable.com/2010/08/27/google-million-calls/" type="box_count" name="fb_share" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://mashable.com/2010/08/27/google-million-calls/&src=sp" style="text-decoration: none;"> href="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis/login?url=http://mashable.com/2010/08/27/google-million-calls/&title=One Million Calls Placed From Gmail in 24 Hours&related=true&style=true">

If you’re as big as Google, there’s no such thing as a small product launch. So when Google introduced href="http://mashable.com/2010/08/25/google-voice-gmail-2/">voice calls into its webmail service Gmail, essentially launching a Skype competitor, it was bound to be a…

target="_blank" href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http://mashable.com/2010/08/27/youtube-400-free-movies/&service=bit.ly"> target="_blank" class='feedflare' href="http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=http://mashable.com/2010/08/27/youtube-400-free-movies/&title=YouTube Launches Movies Section for UK Residents&srcTitle=Mashable&srcUrl=http://mashable.com"> target="_blank" share_url="http://mashable.com/2010/08/27/youtube-400-free-movies/" type="box_count" name="fb_share" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://mashable.com/2010/08/27/youtube-400-free-movies/&src=sp" style="text-decoration: none;"> href="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis/login?url=http://mashable.com/2010/08/27/youtube-400-free-movies/&title=YouTube Launches Movies Section for UK Residents&related=true&style=true">YouTube has launched its href="http://www.youtube.com/movies" target="_blank">Movies section for UK residents, with 400 free movies in the catalog.

The UK version of the Movies section follows the launch of the href="http://www.youtube.com/shows">Shows section of the site, which brought full…

Here’s something you will not read every time an acquisition deal collapses at the last minute: an account of what happened, and why it did. Let alone why it happened twice over.

Backblaze, an online storage and backup startup based in Palo Alto, this morning published a blog post about not one but two acquisition deals that fell through, ‘breaking down the breakup’. They don’t name names, but other than that it’s a refreshingly open account.