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More than 5,500 removed between May 1, 2008, and Jan. 31, 2009

RALEIGH, North Carolina – Facebook has removed more than 5,500 convicted sex offenders from its social networking Web site since May, Connecticut’s attorney general said Thursday.

Richard Blumenthal said the world’s largest social networking site, which claims to have more than 175 million active members, reported to his office that 5,585 convicted sex offenders were found on the Web site and removed between May 1, 2008, and Jan. 31, 2009.

“The message in this number is Facebook has an equal stake in solving this problem of protecting children,” said Blumenthal, who along with North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper has led an effort remove sex offenders from the social networking web sites.

“They have an equal stake in the predator problem and its solution.”

Earlier this month, rival networking site MySpace announced it had removed 90,000 sex offenders in a two-year period.

Last year, the attorneys general got both sites to implement dozens of safeguards, including finding better ways to verify users’ ages and putting limits on older users’ ability to search the profiles of members under 18.

Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said the convicted sexual offenders on the site were found through user reports, working with local law enforcement agencies and using the national sex offender registry.

He said Facebook’s focus on members using their real names and identities helps discourage sex offenders, and even more is being planned to prevent them from registering. Earlier this month, Facebook officials said policy dictated that no convicted sex offender be allowed to keep a Facebook page.

Kelly said the company has pitched a proposal to attorneys general around the country to develop a real-time system cross-checking available outlets and “block any registration from the get-go.”

“Our policy has been to remove convicted sex offenders when they are reported or identified through any means,” Kelly said.

Social-networking site claims ability to control user information forever

NEW YORK – Tens of thousands of Facebook users are protesting new policies that they say grant the social-networking site the ability to control their information forever, even after they cancel their accounts.

Facebook’s new terms of use, updated Feb. 4, largely went unnoticed until the popular consumer rights advocacy blog Consumerist.com pointed out the changes Sunday.

That prompted a clarification from Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, although the new terms remain in force. Zuckerberg told users in a blog post Monday that “on Facebook, people own their information and control who they share it with.”  When someone shares a photo, a message or a status update telling friends what they are up to at the moment, they first need to grant Facebook a license so the site can pass that information along to authorized friends, Zuckerberg said. Without the license, he said, Facebook wouldn’t be able to help people share information.

Zuckerberg said the new terms are necessary to reflect the fact that friends may retain a copy of that message or other information once a user shares it with them.

“Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message,” Zuckerberg said. “We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like e-mail work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.”

Zuckerberg did acknowledge that Facebook, which boasts 175 million users around the world, still has “work to do to communicate more clearly” about how information is shared on the site.

The rapidly growing site has had several run-ins with users over its short history.

In late 2007, for example, a tracking tool called “Beacon” caught users off-guard by broadcasting information about their shopping habits and activities at other Web sites. After initially defending the practice, Facebook ultimately allowed users to turn Beacon off.

Facebook is five. Maybe you didn’t get it in your news feed, but it was in February 2004 that Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, along with some classmates, launched the social network that ate the world.

Did he realize back then in his dorm that he was witnessing merely the larval stage of his creation? For what began with college students has found its fullest, richest expression with us, the middle-aged.

Here are 10 reasons Facebook is for old fogies:

1. Facebook is about finding people you’ve lost track of. And, son, we’ve lost track of more people than you’ve ever met. Remember who you went to prom with junior year? See, we don’t. We’ve gone through multiple schools, jobs and marriages. Each one of those came with a complete cast of characters, most of whom we have forgotten existed. But Facebook never forgets.

2. We’re no longer bitter about high school. You’re probably still hung up on any number of petty slights, but when that person who used to call us that thing we’re not going to mention here, because it really stuck, asks us to be friends on Facebook, we happily friend that person. Because we’re all grown up now. We’re bigger than that. Or some of us are, anyway. We’re in therapy, and it’s going really well. These are just broad generalizations. Next reason.

3. We never get drunk at parties and get photographed holding beer bottles in suggestive positions. We wish we still did that. But we don’t.

4. Facebook isn’t just a social network; it’s a business network. And unlike, say, college students, we actually have jobs. What’s the point of networking with people who can’t hire you? Not that we’d want to work with anyone your age anyway. Given the recession–and the amount of time we spend on Facebook–a bunch of hungry, motivated young guns is the last thing we need around here.

5. We’re lazy. We have jobs and children and houses and substance-abuse problems to deal with. At our age, we don’t want to do anything. What we want is to hear about other people doing things and then judge them for it. Which is what news feeds are for.

6. We’re old enough that pictures from grade school or summer camp look nothing like us. These days, the only way to identify us is with Facebook tags.

7. We have children. There is very little that old people enjoy more than forcing others to pay attention to pictures of their children. Facebook is the most efficient engine ever devised for this.

8. We’re too old to remember e-mail addresses. You have to understand: we have spent decades drinking diet soda out of aluminum cans. That stuff catches up with you. We can’t remember friends’ e-mail addresses. We can barely remember their names.

9. We don’t understand Twitter. Literally. It makes no sense to us.

10. We’re not cool, and we don’t care. There was a time when it was cool to be on Facebook. That time has passed. Facebook now has 150 million members, and its fastest-growing demographic is 30 and up. At this point, it’s way cooler not to be on Facebook. We’ve ruined it for good, just like we ruined Twilight and skateboarding. So git! And while you’re at it, you damn kids better get off our lawn too.

These days, online services and applications are sexy. Hardware? Not so much.

SAN FRANCISCO (Fortune) — Our love affair with PC hardware may be waning in this recession. Instead, we’re smitten with services.

We still like the results of computing – we couldn’t have services like our beloved YouTube, Facebook or iTunes without warehouses full of servers somewhere, processing bits. But there are signs that we’re burning out on buying traditional computers.

Look at the numbers. PC sales are off. So are Intel’s earnings (down 90% from a year ago), and Microsoft’s (down 11%). And computer retail? Let’s not even talk about the woes of Circuit City or CompUSA.  Even cell phone sales are suffering, but at least there’s excitement at the high end with the iPhone, BlackBerry, and upcoming Palm Pre – all of which blend computer-like features with pocketable convenience. Contrast that with PC-land, where the only sustained buzz appears to be around low-end netbooks.

Businesses are shifting the focus of their tech spending as well. Consider Dell , the hardware giant. When Dell hosts dozens of corporate technology buyers near its headquarters this week, a prominent theme will be how to get by with less technology gear, says outgoing Dell Chief Information Officer Steve Schuckenbrock. That might sound self-defeating, but rather than try to sell customers a lot more hardware, Dell will focus on offering them – get this – advice on how to be more efficient.

The services racket, meanwhile, is going gangbusters. Again, some numbers: IBM’s earnings rose 12% despite the economic meltdown, largely thanks to a services arm that uses IBM technology and smarts to solve customer problems. (IBM’s hardware business, meanwhile, was off 20%.)

Google – which is really a glorified advertising service – recently turned in quarterly results that were stronger than analysts expected. Salesforce.com (CRM), the poster child for online business services, said sales rose 43% in the most recent quarter.

What do these companies have in common? They don’t try to fuel growth with big-ticket hardware sales. Instead, they sell service contracts or online software, part of a pitch to save customers money. These days, that pitch is resonating.

As Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said back in November: In this economy, “customers are not going to bring out their checkbooks for the cost and risk and complexity of big database purchases, or application server purchases, or data center purchases.” They’re buying more services, and fewer servers.

What does this mean for tech? Hardware certainly isn’t dead, but our relationship with it may be changing.

For consumers, it could mean a rapid shift toward cheaper gadgets. In the past, the masses continually needed expensive new computers for word processing, web surfing, photo editing, etc., and bought more powerful PCs. Maybe now folks mostly want devices that let them connect to Internet-based services, send a few Tweets, or upload a quick video – tasks that don’t require the most powerful gear.

It’s possible that as a result, consumers will buy more netbooks and smartphones, but fewer full-fledged PCs. In the short term, that might seem like bad news for PC industry stalwarts like Intel, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Dell – but there also could be opportunities for them to make money by growing their business selling the lower-cost devices.

What does it mean for businesses? So far, it means more outsourcing. The benefit is pretty straightforward: Rather than keep your own I.T. staff, buy your own computers and software and struggle to make it work, you can pay an outsourcing company a flat fee to handle those headaches. These days that idea is so popular that IBM saw its North American outsourcing business grow 45% last quarter, a spokesman told me.

As quickly as business conditions are changing, the technology services could still stumble in 2009. But so far, they’re looking better than hardware.

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