At 216 slides, 'The Real Life Social Network' by Paul Adams takes a fair bit of time to wade through, but it does offer some interesting insights into the various ways in which identity, context and connections play out (and differ) in the real and virtual worlds. More importantly, with rumours flying thick and fast about Google Me, this could be a pointer as to how the product could work. Of course, with the assumption that Google Me is indeed a reality.

Facebook has been trying very hard to communicate to all of the internet that the new defaults are something that will benefit all of us and the internet as a whole. The founder CEO, Mark Zuckerberg does not spare any opportunity to remind us that he wants to make the world a more open place.

For a company that wants its users to open up and share everything, you'd assume that Facebook's senior executives would practice what they preach. But reality is far from that assumption.

These are interesting times, made even more interesting by the unveiling of Facebook's new Open Graph Protocol. To say that this has not been in the works would be an omission of a grievous nature. It has been coming for a while, even if the pundits have been screaming something else from the rooftops: that Facebook - because of their closed nature - is threat to Google. There has never been greater misunderstanding of how both Facebook and Google work than to claim something like that.

The network neutrality debate is an exceedingly complex one. At its heart, network neutrality aims to ensure that all services are treated neutrally on a network, which is a noble-enough aim, but one that is not realistic if you know how the internet functions in the real world.

Behind the scenes, on any network, connecting from point A to point B is never as simple as finding the shortest route between the two. Depending on a number of factors, even machines on the same network may or may not take an entire roundtrip around the globe to get talking to each other.

Publishing content online is 2/4th measurement, 1/4th experimentation and 1/4th instinct. It is sometimes a science, sometimes an art and a lot of other times blind guesswork. After reading the Afaqs story that asked whether print publications in India are getting their story wrong in online, my thoughts went back to the year 2000, when I started out in online media in India.

This is part of a series of posts on some of the products I have used and come to love/hate through the year.

Abinash Tripathy lays it out, in pretty good detail, the litany of things that are wrong with the great Indian media companies in how they are going to blow it with the opportunities in the online domain. I have added my two bits in the comments there and I have written quite a bit on the subject here and elsewhere, so I won't add to the chorus that is already cooking up a hit record there now.

It is not uncommon in the world of blogs and micro-blogging to bash media professionals for their lack of involvement in those spheres or the way they choose to get involved in them. I have been lucky enough in my professional life to see both sides of the divide (as a blogger, Twitter-user and as someone who worked for close to a decade in digital media) and I believe that sometimes the problem really is that there is no simple, easy-to-understand explanation of how things work out there. So, this is an attempt at that.

The full page advertising blitzkrieg launched by Yahoo! India on Monday was wrong on so many different levels that I am tempted to strike out everything that I had previously said about the company here. Then again, Yahoo! India has been a different beast from its parent division, lacking in consistency, direction and focus, with the only common thread being the manner in which both have wasted away the tremendous head start they have previously had in the space.

So, Yahoo! is now looking to sell off even Zimbra, the white-label email company that it acquired in 2007, in what seems to be a crazy effort to get rid of a lot potentially valuable divisions within the company. It seems to be the case that Carol Bartz has gone off her rocker, or that she is not going to stop until, one way or the other, Yahoo!