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Google has been on a killing spree the last few months, whacking projects that are non-essential to the company strategy or that haven't caught on. Even though this has angered some users, Google is still stubbornly clinging to one of its biggest dogs to date: ChromeOS and the Chromebooks.

Google announced the ChromeOS in July 2009, and finally started shipping them to consumers in June of this year. (Not counting Cr-48s, which weren't commercially available.)

So what's the next step, I asked? Do people start wearing biometric tokens that send signals to devices in the neighborhood, letting you know when you're in their vicinity so they can respond by tweeting you to please buy them?

Sure, why not, comes the swift response from Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. Last August, as regular ReadWriteWeb readers will recall, Benioff astounded his audience at the Dreamforce conference with the mind-alteringly imminent notion that Coke machines should become aware of their customers' presence, and respond through their iPhones with bargains and loyalty points. Of course, Benioff's idea at that time relied upon the customer always having his iPhone with him. This time, at the Cloudforce conference in New York this morning, Benioff one-upped his own idea with the notion that a biometric bracelet could supply interested products and devices in the wearer's immediate vicinity with a kind of identity signal.

You have to admit, he's getting better at this. Four years ago, in response to numerous public complaints - many of them in court - about its plans to share aggregate user data with third parties, Facebook responded in a flat, dismissive tone that users were given every opportunity to opt out of behavior sharing. So what they don't opt out of is effectively their own problem.

Today's settlement between Facebook and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission effectively ensures that the company can no longer take this specific stance without facing intense U.S. government scrutiny. But in the intervening four years, Facebook has become a veteran of government scrutiny, including from the Canadian Privacy Commissioner and throughout Europe. And it has gained a lot more skill at adapting its semantics to strike the right political and often psychological tones.

Last Wednesday, ReadWriteWeb published a legal analysis of the Stop Online Piracy Act and its Senate Counterpart, the PROTECT-IP bill. Our story prompted a spirited, logical, and largely rational debate between e-novel author Rowena Cherry, who supports the legislation, and TechDirt founder Michael Masnick, who opposes it.

I've been on record as saying that we as a society have forgotten how to debate. These two have not. While they may not always have been as strictly civil with one another as Lincoln and Douglas, they both demonstrated some lessons that both opponents and supporters of the bill may perhaps put to good use:

It seems like only yesterday RWW's own Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote the foreword to a book discussing the new ecosystem, business models and value chains in a hyper-connected world. In actuality, it was a little over a year ago when the book, The Shift, was released. It documented an 18-month primary research study commissioned by Alcatel-Lucent to assess the market potential of various network APIs - including presence, profiling and location, among others - across an ecosystem of developers, advertisers, consumers and enterprises.

Culling the inputs of over 10,000 respondents from the research, my co-author and I boldly predicted a $100 billion incremental market opportunity when telecom networks are leveraged as development platforms. The impressive figure is derived, in part, through the creation of new business models between developers, advertisers and service providers.

The Associated Press this afternoon quoted European Commission Vice President Viviane Reding as stating that the E.U. government should not only federalize its approach to granting safe harbor for social networks, but essentially should hold all Internet service providers on the continent, including social networks, responsible for informing Internet users when personal information is being collected from them.

The quote seemed a little fishy, so ReadWriteWeb this morning ran it past Comm. Reding's spokesperson, Matthew Newman. As it turns out, according to Newman's information, the AP quote was indeed taken out of context. Words from the misquote originally appeared in a September 10 interview with the BBC, in response to a speech by Comm. Reding from last March. In its native context, Comm. Reding does not call for a limitation on the European framework for Safe Harbor with respect to social networks - an issue for which Comm. Reding was an outspoken champion.

Enterprises are increasingly turning to the cloud for their computing needs, and are now accessing everything from individual applications to entire infrastructures remotely rather than via on-premises
hardware and software. Meanwhile, the sheer volume of data that enterprises have to deal with is exploding, as is the number of sources of that data.

Data needs to travel without encumbrances in the enterprise for people to take full advantage of its capabilities. Organizations need to have an infrastructure in place that can handle multiple forms of data effectively. That infrastructure also has to be elastic and flexible enough in order for development teams to deploy the applications the enterprise needs to stay competitive.

Okay, time to get shopping today, at least according to all the merchants who have had their doors open since last night. But how about putting some of the retail therapy to better use? Apica, the cloud performance measurement vendor, is sponsoring a contest, and the first prize is a $1000 Amazon gift card. Certainly, we all spend too much with Amazon as it is, but this could go towards a new Kindle or a bunch of videos to bulk up your holiday collection.

Earlier this month, Forrester's Boris Evelson gave his top ten predictions for business intelligence for the coming year. Some of them bear repeating, some bear further reaction and clarification. What is clear is that this space is poised to take off, with just the right mix of products and innovation.

While thus far, there's general consensus that Tim Cook is doing, and may continue to do, a fine job at Apple stepping into the shoes of his lauded predecessor, Steve Jobs, there looms a bigger issue. There appears to be, at least in the public conscience, a lack of leadership and direction from the chief executives of corporations, including tech firms. And in fact, 2011 may be characterized as a year of misdirection from the head office.

Is this actually a problem; do Americans and Canadians actually need a CEO they can look up to? Or are CEOs typically glorified by virtue of a lack of deserving leaders in the public space? This American reporter discussed these questions with our favorite Canadian contributor, CTV News Channel analyst Carmi Levy.