ReadWriteWeb

A couple of weeks ago, Facebook started rolling out semantic changes to the Events feature. The options "Yes," "Maybe" and "No" have changed to "Join," "Maybe" and "Decline," essentially making Facebook Events seem more like Facebook Groups.

Facebook also added a new additional events button to every Event. If you click, it will lead you to all the other Events in your queue at facebook.com/events.

Why would Facebook make going to an event feel more like joining a group?

Today we received confirmation that Facebook is officially hiring Gowalla's engineers and designers. They will move to Facebook in January.

Facebook is not acquiring the actual Gowalla service or the technology behind it. Gowalla states that Facebook will not inherit any of Gowalla's user data, and that it will soon provide users a way to export their Passport data, Stamp and Pin data (along with legacy Item data) and photos. What does the end of Gowalla mean for the launch of Facebook's Timeline feature and the new era of lifestreaming?

CNNMoney reports that Facebook has just acquired the location-based sharing service Gowalla. Sources say that Gowalla's employees will move to Facebok's Palo Alto offices and work on the Timeline feature, which is all about telling stories. Gowalla had recently shifted its vision to storytelling.

When Gowalla launched in 2009, it faced off against rival location-based social network Foursquare. Since then, Foursquare grew leaps and bounds in the location space, transitioning from a check-in service to a partner of daily deals giant Groupon. Gowalla got lost in the dust.

Read our full coverage of Gowalla, 2010 up to right now, after the jump.

Today Google rolled out the latest of its Google+ integration projects. This time it was YouTube, which at the same time launched a snazzy new design. The redesign is not only visually more colorful and appealing, it also promotes sharing in a big way. YouTube is enabling you to autoshare to four different social networks: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Orkut. But wait... notice anything missing there? That's right, Google+ is not included in the autosharing.

On the face of it, this makes little sense. Now I can 'like' a video on YouTube and it automatically shows up on my Facebook wall and Twitter feed. That's actually very cool. It saves me having to manually share things, yet I still control the autosharing (as I have to click the 'like' button in YouTube). Indeed this is frictionless sharing the way it should be - the user is in control of what gets shared, but it's made much easier for them. So why on earth isn't Google+ part of the autosharing?

The Facebook+Journalists Page announced that now everyone can write posts with 60,000 characters, making status updates feel more like the not-so-often used notes feature, which doesn't appear at all in the Facebook Timeline-version at all.

The amount of characters one can write into a Facebook status update has been steadily increasing over the years, growing from 160 (how Twitter-like!) to 420, then to 500. In September, it reached 5,000. This new jump seems abrupt; the last big increase was 4,500 characters. This one is 55,000 characters, or 12 times as many characters as before.

The YouTube redesign we got a sneak peak into last month is now going live for all users. It has been reborn as a social and customizable media site, letting users customize their lists of channels right on the front page, as well as share to Google+ and Facebook.

It might be surprising to see Facebook integration so prominently on YouTube, with Google+ is trying to make a name for itself, but think of it this way: Facebook is huge. YouTube is huge. Google+ is not yet huge. What better way for Google to introduce Facebook users to Google+?

Secure.me is a new security service that "offers consumers a way to regain control over their privacy on the Internet and social networks." Parents, too, can now monitor (stalk?) their children online.

"Our life has long merged with the online world," says co-founder Christian Sigl. "We use online services, social networks and mobile apps so actively that it's hard to keep track of every personal information about us, which is visible to others on the Internet - whether we put it there ourselves or it was placed there by friends, acquaintances or even completely strings."

Should young people and especially children be required to read the legal jargon found on social networks like Facebook and just take more control of their online security, or is that the responsibility of parents? Or should that actually be in the hands of services like Secure.me?

An app called Path launched its version 2 do-over yesterday. "The smart journal that helps you share life with the ones you love," it calls itself now. I ignored this app until today. All I saw from version 1 was emoji spam in my Twitter stream. Let's take it as read that version 1 failed to catch on, hence version 2. How does an app help you "share life with the ones you love?"

The tech "world," or "scene," or whatever it is, is in love with this app. It tingled with excitement when Path went "stealthish" in 2010. It launched later that year weirdly lacking in features, and the blogerati still fawned over it. What is it about Path? How does "love" arise from Objective-C and 3.5 inches of glass? By evoking the people in your life, of course. And Path does that, just as Facebook does. It's a life stream. An ego trip. "Share life with the ones you love," especially yourself.

It appears that the U.S. government has resumed Operation In Our Sites, a program aimed at capturing counterfeit and pirated products online. Today a federal judge in Nevada ruled in favor of luxury goods maker Chanel in a battle against websites trafficking counterfeit luxury goods. The court can now seize all questionable domain names, transferring them to a US-based registrar GoDaddy. Wait, what?

Venkat Balasubramani writes about this bizarre case Eric Goldman's technology and law blog. He asks why the case was took place in Nevada, and asks why not one of the 228 websites were able to say something in their defense. It is unclear whether all of these sites are even registered in the United States.

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.