Zuckerberg stressed that the feature works very well on mobile devices. Facebook has an entire page devoted to this change here, complete with screenshots and video.

What makes this significant is that prior to the update people were just talking and posting in real-time the things they wanted to share with their friends.

This new format allows you to go back in time to periods in your life that happened before there was a Facebook, making your Facebook profile into a graphically-intense version of your entire life.

It's now not only a recent history tool, it's the chronology of significant events over the course of your life.

Roberts celebrates 10 years in venture capital this month. He began as part of Salt Lake City's Wasatch Venture Fund (now Epic Ventures), an affiliate of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, in March of 2001. We thought readers might like to know more about this interesting player in the tech community.

-Bryce Roberts,
Why I Deleted My AngelList AccountSince co-founding the OATV fund in 2005, Roberts has made investments in the popular geo-location site Foursquare (where he's a board member), Parakey (founded by Firefox creator Blake Ross and acquired by Facebook), UK-based Path Intelligence, a site dedicated to tracking shopping patterns and "quantified self" fitness tracker service RunKeeper.  As an undergrad, he studied philosophy at Brigham Young University.

Roberts recently offered some interesting advice to would-be fund raisers who've not yet launched their companies.  "If you're looking for funding for a prelaunch product or service, you'll need a to be a very interesting person [or someone] with deep expertise in your field," Roberts wrote in a guest post on Mashable. "Amplifying that expertise through blogs, Twitter, live streams will get you the attention of VCs, too. If you don't qualify as either, all the right intros in the world won't get you VC funding."

You can follow Roberts on Twitter (where he's most active), his personal blog Bryce.vc, on Facebook or on Quora.

What's an "ID Pack?"

There are three different types of packs available: branded, non-branded and personalized.

Branded ID packs feature a company's own applications and services, like Yahoo's new pack which offers easy access to Yahoo content like the homepage, Mail, Messenger, News, Sports, Finance, Flickr, Fantasy Football, Search, Movies, Weather and omg!.

Non-branded packs are more like curated selections of content. Sprint offers a few of these with focuses on Entertainment, Social Networking, Health and Fitness and Business Productivity.

For example, the "Entertainment" Sprint ID pack contains apps for music (Shazam, Pandora, Rhapsody), movies (IMDB) and TV (TMZ) as well as entertainment-related news (E! News, Express News, Horoscopes), Games (Guitar Hero 5, Super KO Boxing 2, WSOP Hold'em), social networking (Facebook, Twitter, Wertago) and YouTube.

Finally, users can create their own packs by customizing an available packs with their own apps and content. Only five different ID packs can be stored on a device.

A Clever Solution to App Overload, Blurred Boundaries Between Work and Play

Although Hesse touted the ID packs as an improved way for users to customize their phones, find apps and change the phone's settings, assuming this is just another nifty homescreen customization tool is selling it short.

People's phones are now extensions of their lives - they're used for business, for keeping in touch with friends, for playing games, listening to music, streaming video and so much more. But organizing our varying personas and needs is becoming increasingly difficult. We're now close to the "overload" point with our phones becoming inundated with apps. (For app addicts like yours truly, it's getting ugly, I tell you).

Different vendors are attempting to solve the problem in different ways - Apple introduced folders for apps, Windows Phone 7 is using attention-grabbing "hubs,"
and Android users have customizable homescreens that can contain both widgets and apps.

Sprint's ID solution may or may not be the answer - we'll need to test its functionality and performance, first - but at least it's a new take. You can learn more about Sprint ID from the new homepage here.

The next time you visit your Profile page (if you haven't done so already), you'll be introduced to the new "Connected Profiles" option, one of the many potentially concerning privacy-related changes announced at Facebook's f8 developer conference last week. With this option, the text in your Facebook profile section where you list your hometown, education, work and interests, is now being linked to the respective pages on Facebook. So for example, if you live in New York, that's linked directly to a page for New York. If your favorite TV show is "Lost," you'll be linked to that show's page, and so on.

Those who choose not to link, though, are informed via a Facebook pop-up box that their Profile page will be left empty.

According to news posted on Facebook's official company blog last week, the Connected Profiles option offers more than "just boring text," wrote Facebook software engineer Alex Li. "These connections are actually Pages, so your profile will become immediately more connected to the places, things and experiences that matter to you," Li says.

Sounds good, right?

Well, maybe not. Whether or not this change is actually an improvement for the social network's end users is still up for debate. For starters, many Facebook users had included in their profile section witty sayings and other text that couldn't be exactly matched up with a Facebook Page. Now, if you want to express yourself in this more "free-form" way, you'll have to do so in the "Bio" section of your Profile instead.

That may be bit of an inconvenience, but it's not necessarily the most concerning aspect of the new Connected Profiles. It's their by default public nature that's most troubling.

How Connected Profiles Work

When you revisit your Profile page, explained Li on the Facebook blog, you'll see a box pop-up asking you to link your profile to Pages that reflect your listed interests and affiliations. You can either pick some of these pages or click "Link All to My Profile" to accept all of Facebook's suggestions.

Yet in examining the design of the pop-up box itself, it's clear that it's been crafted so that the "Link All" button, shaded in blue, is the option hurried users will click in an effort to get back to what they were doing - attempting to edit their profile.

Years of poor web experiences filled with pop-up ads, long user agreements no one reads and unnecessary screens on software installations that seem to serve no purpose but to have you click the "Next" button have created a certain type of blindness to pop-up text on the web. Instead of thoughtfully considering the options, a majority of users simply click the button that makes the message go away. You can bet that Facebook is counting on precisely this behavior regarding the new Profiles.

Opting-Out a Poor Option

But even for those who actually do consider the implications of everything about themselves being made public, they'll soon encounter another issue. Something that Li didn't explain in the cheery blog post was what would happen if you refused to link to these new Pages: your profile information will be removed and your profile page will be left empty.

According to a FAQ from Facebook's Help Center:

"If you don't want to connect to any Pages, the corresponding sections on your Profile will be empty. Connecting to Pages will now be the main way to express yourself on your profile, and you can always edit your profile to remove specific suggested Pages that you don't want to connect to."

This isn't a forced "opt-in," like the instant personalization option that's currently being examined by several U.S. senators, including Charles Schumer, Michael Bennet, Mark Begich and Al Franken, but it certainly feels like an arm-twisting on Facebook's part. It makes opting-out a poor choice, one that degrades the overall Facebook experience.

Making Your Interests Public

That's not to say that this forced link-building doesn't have its pluses - Facebook can now build a web of connections from people to their interests and then allow those details to be shared with the "instantly personalized" websites like Pandora and Yelp. If you leave the privacy issues aside momentarily, you'll see that does offer some intriguing possibilities for a more social web. In addition, other sites can offer Facebook "like imports," an optional feature that would allow you to immediately get a web service up to speed on who you are and what you're into. This is a great feature for recommendation-type sites like Lunch.com, for instance, which is implementing this option today.

However, the high-pressure tactics being used to get people to link to Facebook Pages are a good example of how Facebook is coyly forcing people to go public with their previously more private, personal data. Although the pop-up box quietly warns "Remember, your Pages are public," few Facebook users will likely take note of that text. (After all, if thousands of people managed to confuse this blog with Facebook, we doubt they can grasp the finer points of data privacy.)

So what should your takeaway be from all this mess? Look before you link.

In fact, it may be best if you just assume that everything on Facebook will be public from now on and act accordingly.

Update: Google has now closed this loophole. Here is a statement we just got from a Google spokesperson:

Blogger harmonyguy helped us discover a bug that made it possible to discover a user's email address based on their numeric profile ID. Our engineers worked hard to address this issue and it is now fixed.

Security blogger The Harmony Guy just told us about how this hack works. While the way to reveal these addresses isn't obvious, you can easily follow along and try this method out yourself.

How does it work?

First, you simply copy the numbers from a user's Google profile and then append these numbers to http://picasaweb.google.com/[numbers].

For some users who haven't customized their Picasa page, the username (which is also their Gmail address) will come right up. If the user has customized the account and added a nickname, you simply have to replace the URL in the address bar with javascript:alert(_user.name); and a small pop-up window will show you the username.

Caveats

It's important to note that this only works for Google users who also use the Picasa web service. This, however, is likely a large percentage of Gmail users.

How to Protect Yourself

In Picasa Web Albums, go to the settings page and add a new username. Then, select the new username for your gallery URL. As The Harmony Guy points out, you may also want to edit your nickname.

Is this a major issue for Google? Probably not. But given the ruckus around privacy, Buzz and Google Profiles these days, it is disheartening to see that it is this easy to circumvent the only way to hide your Gmail address from public view. After all, if you want to use Google Buzz, Google forces you to have a public profile.

You can choose the amount of personal information you want to display in your profile and Microsoft gives you very granular control over what parts of your profile you want to share with others. You can, for example, choose to share your last name and location only with friends, but make information about your relationship status and hometown public. You can also choose to make some items only available to a small sub-set of your friends.

Favorites

Live Profiles also allows you to create an annotated list of favorite books, movies, and music. One of the nice features here is that Microsoft matches your text entry with images from its Zune catalog or Amazon's book store, and links to both stores directly, which gives this feature more depth than just a simple list of favorite things in Facebook or other social networking sites.

A Little Bit of Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed

Overall, it seems that Live Profiles and the new Windows Live Homepage will tie Microsoft's Live Services together into a very comprehensive social network. While it doesn't have widgets that let you poke your friends, it does have a broad set of applications like Photos,Spaces, Contacts, Groups, Calendar, and Events that can all be integrated into your Live Profile. You can also post Twitter-like messages (Microsoft calls them 'notes') to your profile that will then appear in your friends' accounts as well.

While Microsoft isn't directly marketing it as such, Windows Live is, in reality a formidable challenge to other social networks.

As MySpace develops, so develop the next generation of mainstream web users and thus the web at large. Whether you're a MySpace user or not, it's worthwhile to keep an eye on what the company is doing - especially in terms of user experience.

Fully aware that major changes often cause a major backlash, MySpace has made Profile 2.0 fully opt-in and is saving a copy of their Profile 1.0 of any users who switch, for 90 days. That's smart.

These changes are important. Granular privacy controls on MySpace can help raise the expectations of mainstream users for increasing sophistication regarding privacy in particular and control over their data in general. That means we can all hope for increased vendor support for user control over data - the excuse that mainstream users don't care may not hold up much longer.

W3C standards compliance is good news because a standards compliant web is a web where site rendering doesn't stand in the way of economies of scale for developers. If your code for displaying, rendering, searching or otherwise interacting with websites isn't going to work across all sites - that's a major disincentive for large-scale innovation. W3C compliance is nearly complete for the new MySpace profiles and that's great news.

Though MySpace doesn't get the respect that Facebook does, we still believe that from MySpace is the social networking leader in a number of important ways. Granular privacy controls, for example, Facebook? We'd like that.

Profile 2.0 is going to make a lot of MySpace users unhappy, but only if they're truly happy with their current profile. We think anyone that's been waiting for Myspace to do some serious spring cleaning on how users can customize their profiles is going to love Profile 2.0. To access Profile 2.0:

• Make sure you're not logged into MySpace
• Head to MySpace Canada
• Login to your MySpace account as you normally would

You should now see a small yellow box at the top of your MySpace homepage inviting you to try out the Alpha of Profile 2.0.

What MySpace Should've Looked Like in the Beginning

Profile 2.0 allows for users to customize a lot more of their profile than words. Users can now drag and drop modules, add and remove modules, change themes, privacy settings, profile layouts and more. The advance edit mode allows those with more advanced HTML knowledge to fill out their profile with custom CSS and offers more control over module styles. You are also presented with a visual preview of every change made.

Rearranging My Space

All in all, the new Profile 2.0 will be a great tool to use once it goes public. However those that are already using custom templates from the thousands of sites that offer free MySpace themes may be at a loss until web designers catch up. Profile 2.0 will break most of the custom MySpace themes available. If you choose to try out Profile 2.0 MySpace reserves your 1.0 profile just in case you don't like what you see in Profile 2.0. In any case, back up your current profile settings before trying out Profile 2.0.

Today, though, you'll finally have a new option for sharing who you are with the rest of the world: MeeID.com. This simple web app is easy, straightforward, and entirely customized by you.

MeeID is such a simple application that it hardly needs an explanation. You just go to the web site, sign up for an account and create your profile. Your profile consists solely of a photo you upload and 10 lines (which can be links). That's it. That's your MeeID.

You can see an example MeeID below:

In the above example, Bronson used MeeID to link to his profile on various sites, his online resume, and other sites of interest. However, that's just one way to use this service. MeeID suggests several other ideas, including using MeeID to list your top ten goals, using it to list your contact information like an online business card, putting it in your email signature, and more. We personally like their suggestion of forwarding a custom domain name to the site (Finally, a use for .name URLs?)

Making a MeeID

A search box on the site lets you search the MeeIDs of other users. It found mine by username (sarahintampa) and first name (Sarah), but couldn't locate me when I entered first name and last (Sarah Perez). That could be an issue. We can't be expected to know people's usernames in order to locate their MeeIDs and a one name search query could return an overwhelming number of results once the site becomes more heavily used. Just image having to search for a "John," "Bill," or any other common name in order to locate your friend's MeeID!

Favorites

You can also save your favorite MeeIDs which are then available as a drop-down from the top of the page. Others visiting your profile can view these, too. Although it's understandable that they're trying to keep the app simple, the fact that they limit you to only ten favorites may mean we'll have to make some hard choices in the future as to who gets to appear in that list.

Ads

MeeID is sponsored by advertisers that choose to pay to have their links display beneath every person's MeeID on the site. At launch time, three sponsors were showing: AmberMac, Death Cab For Cutie, and Wired Magazine. The ad is beneath your info and really not that intrusive, so if it helps pay the bills, we're OK with that.

Simple = Good

Overall, MeeID is a nifty little app and one that can be used by anyone - not just social media addicts like ourselves. It doesn't do much, but it doesn't really have to. Sometimes a simple app is just what you need. And it's so easy that anyone can understand how to use it in minutes to quickly claim their place on the web.

Atomkeep is a service that aims to help users keep their profiles in sync across multiple networks. Registration is as simple as typing in your email address and a password. A confirmation email will be sent to your email address for verification. Unlike most sites, Atomkeep does not immediately prompt you to enter in the typical user information such as your name, birthday, etc. Instead, you're immediately taken to the 'Manage Accounts' page to choose from a list of social networks to import or merge existing data from. You can use your profiles from other networks to fill in your Atomkeep profile or manually add in this information yourself.

Supported networks for Atomkeep include:

• Twitter
• Plurk
• Disqus
• Facebook
• Technorati
• Blogger
• WordPress
• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• Last.FM
• Ning
• Pownce
• Yelp
• Youtube

Tons more are also supported with support for numerous more social networks on the way.

Synchronizing Your Profiles

You can synchronize all of your profiles or just one by providing your password for each account on the synchronization page. Atomkeep also shows you the synchronization process for each account that you choose to sync. Here's a demo video of how the synchronization process works.

Atomkeep.com: Step Four. Sync. from Olexandr Prokhorenko on Vimeo.

Too Many Social Networks

Are we spreading ourselves so thin across the web that we have to create more utilities in order to keep up? When services such as Atomkeep pop-up, one wonders if maybe we're joining too many social networks. On the other hand, there's no denying that Atomkeep is a handy tool if you're forever changing your information and can't stand the process of updating each of your accounts one by one.

Web developer and active FriendFeed user Hao Chen has created a FriendFeed profile greasemonkey script that will import a user's Twitter profile and display it on FriendFeed.This script will only work if the user has his or her Twitter stream being imported into FriendFeed.

Extended Twitter Profile

While the simple profile that Twitter offers may suffice for some, sometimes you just want more. In comes the Extended Twitter Profile background. Released by Fabrice Epelboin, this is a Photoshop .PSD file that you can customize by adding more images, web addresses, and general information. Once you're done with editing the .PSD, simply save your file as a .jpeg or .png image file and upload it as your Twitter background.

Making Twitter and FriendFeed Better Places

These extensions are a great addition to both communities and good for promoting your site and more. Now you can finally figure out who the guy who keeps requesting you on FriendFeed really is. On the same note, you can finally promote other communities and sites on Twitter without spamming your followers. If you're using the Extended Twitter Profile background, leave a link to your Twitter profile in the comments section and show us what you've done.

We did notice some inconsistencies with the new layout in the developer sandbox version. For example, at least one app had a box appearing on the left side bar on all profile pages, with no clear indication of how to add and remove applications from that area -- or how many would be allowed that special treatment. We also thought it strange that to post to the wall, users are asked to use a box on the Feeds tab, while there is no way to post from the actual Wall page. That said, this is a beta sandbox page, and Facebook informed developers that, "some features are not necessarily enabled and others are still in flux."

When we introduced the new tabbed profiles in February, we theorized that the limited space for applications was an attempt to encourage developers to create more useful apps. Facebook said then that applications that "don't provide value and meaning for users" would face "challenges" under the new profile layout.

Now that the new profiles are (almost) live, what do you think? Do tabs make sense? On one hand you have extra clicks to get to certain profile information, and profiles are even less able to be customized by the user now. But on the other, there is a lot less garbage in the way of applications that users are forced to wade through to find the information they want -- profiles are now undeniably cleaner. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

What does more restricted space for applications means? Facebook hopes that it translates to better apps. In a blog post last Friday alerting developers of the upcoming changes, Facebook encouraged "application developers to focus on building applications that facilitate communication, generate meaningful activity, and increase users' trust," noting that any applications that "don't provide value and meaning for users" would face "challenges" under the new profile layout.

We noted last month that Facebook applications may have peaked in popularity and that a lot of people are beginning to feel "app fatigue." We suggested then that the solution for developers to overcome app fatigue, and to overcome stricter rules being imposed by Facebook about how applications can be spread via invites was simple: make better applications.

Facebook's looming profile design changes seem to be aimed squarely at the large number of apps that have been developed for its platform that don't add much utility. Once upon a time, people flocked to Facebook in large part because it had a cleaner design than rival social networks. But the launch of the Platform last May started Facebook down the road toward cluttered profiles like this one. Clearly, the social network is attempting to push people toward trimming down their use of applications that provide little utility, and rather focusing on applications that offer "meaningful activity," as they phrase it.

This is a long term strategy for Facebook. In the near term, getting people to stop using silly apps (or at least place less emphasis on them and use them less) means fewer page views and less ad inventory. But in the long term, getting developers to create more apps that have real utility for people, will get more people to rely on Facebook for more of their daily activity -- which furthers the goal of building the Facebook platform into a web operating system.

It is, however, important to take these changes with a grain of salt. What Facebook is showing off now is early in the design process and is not set to drop until Spring, so changes are certainly possible. The social network is inviting users to participate in the design process by giving feedback on iterations of the new profile design.

What do you think of Facebook's planned tabbed profiles? Will it result in better apps? Will diminish the clutter that has begun to take hold of many Facebook profiles? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.