ReadWriteWeb

Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook's recent privacy changes were not nefarious, but rather an unselfish pursuit of "a concept called data portability."

As the one of the people who popularized that concept in relation to social networks, and as a founding member of the organization representing that cause, I'd like to call bullshit on that.

According to an email from the Facebook CEO earlier today, Facebook is planning some changes to their much-debated privacy policies.

Mark Zuckerberg told blogger Robert Scoble, "We're going to be ready to start talking about some of the new things we've built this week."

Facebook is hosting its annual f8 developer conference in San Francisco today. We expect quite a few announcements around new features and products today, including more information about the availability of a firehose of user data, geotagging, payments and the rumored off-site "like" button that publishers will soon be able to embed in their pages.

Read on to find our live blog of Mark Zuckerberg's keynote. The keynote is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. PST (GMT -7:00).

Robert Scoble and Rackspace have just launched the long anticipated Building43 in an effort Scoble describes as, "helping usher businesses into 2010." Said teammate Rocky Barbanica, "Companies can gain so much insight through the people on Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook. We're hoping to help them talk and listen to their customers."

Scoble describes the project as "a community for people who are fanatical about the Internet." What exactly does that mean? Scoble gave ReadWriteWeb a demo to explain.

By now, we are all familiar with Mark Zuckerberg's success story. The explosive international growth of Facebook to over 200 million users continues to land the young founder and CEO in top news stories worldwide. Recently, Time Magazine named Zuckerberg one of the world's most influential people of 2008, and Fast Company named Facebook number 15 in its list of the world's 50 most innovative companies of 2009. At just 23 years of age, Zuckerberg even briefly made Forbes' 400 richest Americans list, temporarily giving him the title of World's Youngest Billionaire.

However we have heard very few stories about Zuckerberg and the inspiration behind Facebook during the period prior to February 4th, 2004, the day he launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room. In this post we tell that story.