Google said in a blog post that it has been inundated with requests to add a "history" function to its Google Latitude, a mobile phone app that shows where your (authorized) friends on the service are located at any given moment. This would be the exact "feature" that Google intentionally disabled at launch to allay concerns about privacy, to much praise from civil libertarians. Google will add logs to your Latitude service now if you flip a switch, and it can also send you "Location Alerts" if you're especially enthusiastic about Orwellian internet services.

Why do we need this? Google's Chris Lambert explained:

I stopped at an awesome BBQ place on my way back from Lake Tahoe this summer, but I couldn't remember the name when my friend was asking about it a few months later. I pulled up my location history for that weekend, found where I was stationary on the drive home, and the restaurant name showed up in Google Maps.

I believe it was Benjamin Franklin who once said, "They who would trade liberty for BBQ soon have none, deserve neither, and end up eating Prison Loaf thanks to small-town CSI wannabes with subpeona power."

[via Gizmodo]

(Top pic by gerlos on Flickr)

Current announced it will eliminate 80 jobs while shifting away from its trademark short-form video packages and "towards proven 30-60 minute formats" from more outside sources. This would mean less video production in Current's Bay Area home base, as reported previously by former Valleywagger Jackson West at NBC Bay Area.

Which means everything is totally awesome and on track, according to a Current press release:

This re-organization was not the result of a need to cut costs. Current Media will have its most profitable year. This financial stability will allow the company to re-allocate resources in order to put further emphasis on areas of the business believed to best position Current Media for continued long-term growth.

Financial stability leads to sad job layoffs glorious resource re-allocation, gotcha. More good news: Current journalists no longer have to travel all the way to North Korea to hear propagandist doublespeak!

UPDATE: Current COO Joanna Drake Earl said in an interview that the layoffs hit San Francisco and Los Angeles offices the hardest; and while the firings were not "driven by a need to cut costs," they will indeed result in a net reduction of costs.

She added that "It's always a very sad day to eliminate positions" but that the layoffs were "about being a good media company listening to our consumers... any media company in the business of show production is... watching the dial" in terms of results and adjusting as necessary.Indeed, it sometimes seems like Current is becoming more like the traditional media companies it was intended to serve as counterprogramming against, what with the outsourcing of production, devotion to "consumer" feedback (like ratings!) and layoff rounds.

But Earl said the company remains "very committed" to audience contributions, albeit in "different ways" than through collecting short-form videos, a format now dominated by YouTube and "somewhat confusing" to viewers anyway, according to Earl. Not all short shows have been eliminated; some, like Vanguard Journalism, have actually been lengthened.

So maybe Current TV can grow with its hippie, San Francisco soul intact. That's going to mean acting more like ruthless capitalist media barons. But it's probably the best hope for the remaining employees at the all-too-baffling (and all too obscure) cable network.

(Pic: Gore at a Current TV event last year. By Simone Brunozzi.)

Rasmus Lerdorf, inventor of the PHP programming language, confirms he is leaving the company. "It has only been a couple of days," he told us by email yesterday. "I really don't know what is next yet... I am enjoying having a bit more time to play with pet projects this week."

Lerdorf, whose widely-used programming and templating system has been especially popular among Web startups, declined to elaborate on why he left Yahoo. But he was blunt about the matter on Twitter this past summer, just moments after Yahoo announced a pact in which Microsoft would power its search results — previously handled by in-house code — while Yahoo would continue to sell ads against the results:

If we had to guess where Lerdorf might end up, we'd lay our money on Facebook, a PHP shop and a fast-growing one at that. The massive social network has no doubt pushed Lerdorf's language to the edges of its performance envelope. More importantly, the young company shows no inclination to outsource software development to one of its largest competitors and turn itself into a second-tier advertising network.

(Pic by Aaron Hockley)

Under the old rules of Twitter tradition, you "re-tweeted" another user by placing the letters "RT" before the quote and after any commentary you yourself added, like so:

If you use the new built-in re-tweet system, the original tweet would be copied into your stream under the byline of the original tweeter, like so:

The obvious problem: You lose the ability to actually say anything about what you're quoting if you use the new system. Also, all your followers are going to get a strange and potentially confusing avatar of someone they're not subscribed to in their stream.

On the bright side, this system is great for Twitter Inc. "Retweets potentially reveal very interesting data," Twitter CEO Evan Williams writes in a blog post about the new re-tweeting feature. Indeed, the feature offers a metric with which to rank tweets and thereby the results of Twitter searches and Twitter users themselves. Twitter could sell this data, provided free by its users, to the richest and most favored bidders, just like the microblogging startup did with the actual content of tweets.

The feature also helps Twitter's celebrity power users. Writes Williams:

RTs can actually be easily faked, which has become a form of spam, wherein well-known people are shown to be promoting something they never twittered about.

But, hey, if you don't like this new re-tweet thing that is so awesome for celebrities and Twitter Inc., you can always opt out. As Williams writes (emphasis from original), "you can turn off Retweets for everyone you follow (individually)." So just click "OFF" 200 times? Sounds super-easy!

(Top pic: Twitter co-founders Williams and Biz Stone, by Mathieu Thouvenin.)

Next time, Bucky Turco of Animal New York will just live-tweet the entire makeout session.

Tech investor Paul Kedrosky did not entirely enjoy his flight, but he certainly enjoyed it more than some.

Meanwhile, in Japan, the air travel scene still managed to provoke childlike wonder in Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian. One assumes his former Wired office colleague @beerrobot will take the insult in stride.

Good Charlotte singer Joel Madden is not your clown, Australian morning radio DJs. Maybe Sony BMG's clown, but not yours.

Potty-mouthed tennis star Serena Williams may need to shove some fucking pills down her fucking throat.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

In an email to potential donors (below) first discussed by The Frisky's Jessica Wakeman, Fiorina's campaign manager touts a video (above) of her opponent Sen. Barbara Boxer talking to a general during congressional testimony. The brief conversation seems to have offended no one who was actually involved in it, but Fiorina's campaign calls the video "shocking" and said Boxer "disrespectfully demanded" to be called "senator." Her exact words:

Do me a favor, could you say 'senator' instead of 'm'aam?' It's just a thing. (Laughter.) I worked so hard to get that title. Thank you.

This "shocking" moment of terrible rudeness is obviously the most important issue in California right now. It's a good thing voters have a tough businesswoman like Fiorina to help them identify women who espouse feminist ideals only when it advances their own ego and political interests.

The UC Santa Cruz job is no accident; it was made possible by a donation from the Dead themselves. And it's not just drug bands spreading counterculture good fortune these days:

• Amid mass journalism layoffs, a new hippie-friendly type of gig has opened up: Pot reviewer. Denver's alt weekly went looking for just such a fellow, to serve the booming local market for "medical" marijuana.
  
• Grungy well-heeled young music fans made this year's Coachella music festival a "super happy" success. Far out for concert organizers who refused to grow up and get a "real job!"
• Vegan animal activist Jane Velez-Mitchell has a hit show over on CNN's Headline News and can now aspire to the even greater level of success attained by left-wing-radio-host-turned-MSNBC-anchor (and fellow lesbian) Rachel Maddow. (Maddow was a Rhodes scholar, putting her on the high achieving side of hippiedom.)
  
• The White House installed an organic garden under lobbying from Alice Waters, delivering a PR victory to the restaurateur derided as a hippie "dreamer" on national television just days earlier.
  
• In San Francisco, the sort of company that holds "naked" meetings and makes decisions through unanimous consensus is now showered with VC cash.
  
• A protest marcher from a hippie college changed his name to the militant "Barack" from the placid "Barry" and was soon elected president of these United States.
  
• If you advocate turning your cat vegan or making men pee while sitting down, for the environment, the New York Times will publish your op-ed, these days.

And all this time you thought "get a job" was the ultimate way to insult a hippie. Who's laughing now, straight edge??

(Pic via)

Mayer was employee number 20 and retains immense power within the Googleplex. But, as much as she likes to insinuate her vital early contributions to hits like GMail and AdSense, the VP for "search product and user experience" isn't quite the very bedrock of Google's success, as Glamour seems to imply in naming Mayer one of its "Women of the Year:"

We google about 7 billion times a month. And each time, it's like a trip into Marissa Mayer's mind. That sunny logo, blessedly spare interface and perfect list of links you get in response to a query are all pure Mayer.

Google's minimalist design and "perfect" search utility are "pure Mayer?" Google co-founder and Mayer ex Larry Page would take issue with that; he invented the algorithm at the heart of Google while a Stanford University PhD student. Co-founder Sergey Brin, part of the same PhD program, also contributed to the system. Google also had what was, by the standards of the day, a spartan homepage going well before Mayer joined in 1999, complete with a "sunny" if slightly fatter logo.

So while Mayer should continue to enjoy tonight's Glamour awards ceremony, relish her pretty pictures in the magazine (above) and stand proud of her accomplishments at Google, there's no need to give the competitive overachiever credit for every last innovation at the company.

(Top pic: Glamour)

Mayer discussing her award on Today this morning:

AOL is expected to complete mass layoffs after its spinoff from Time Warner is complete, supposedly by the end of this year. But it sounds like some cuts are too obvious to wait. One hundred firings is modest for a company of around 6,000 workers; AOL continues to work on "Project Everest" to plan the rest, our tipster said. If you know more, email us.

UPDATE: Kara Swisher at All Things D, who has written two books on AOL, was told by her sources that 100 or so layoffs are indeed coming down today. PaidContent later reported likewise.

Meanwhile Electronic Arts is laying off 17 percent of its workforce after the company saw net sales drop 12 percent from the prior year. Which, if you think about the state of the economy, is bizarre: Why aren't you unemployed people out there buying more videogames? Staying home is cheap.

(Image via Zazzle t-shirt/sticker)

Pacific Coast News has snapped a picture of Timberlake on the set of The Social Network, the Facebook flick also staring Jesse Eisenberg as co-founder and current CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew Garfield as spurned co-founder Eduardo Saverin. We've put the shot, above, next to a Jan. 2009 Getty picture of real-life Sean Parker. Timberlake's got the the curly hair down; with some highlights and that wardrobe he might pass for the 'N Sync version of himself from the late 1990s. Click to enlarge.

Timberlake picture by Pacific Coast News

The AdMob deal announced today is the third largest acquisition in Google's history, behind only DoubleClick ($3.1 billion) and YouTube ($1.7 billion). But no one's really been talking about the mobile advertising network or its early-thirtysomething founder Omar Hamoui until now. Hamoui is downright anonymous.

Here's what we've learned about him based on his low internet profile and scant press clippings:

• Has all of 441 followers on Twitter. In contrast, Jason Calacanis, who sold his weblogging company for less than 1/20th as much, has 77,000 followers.
  
• 32 years old as of May.
  
• Earned a bachelor's in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles and dropped out of the MBA program at Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
  
• Ran computer programming company Vertical Blue for almost four years.
  
• Senior program manager at Sony Pictures Digital, about two years.
  
• COO of startup called GoPix.
  
• Started HerBabyShower.com.
  
• Started FotoChatter, for sharing pictures between cell phones, but left the venture behind after becoming frustrated with the inefficiency of advertising his site to mobile users.
  
• Came up with AdMob as a solution to the FotoChatter advertising headaches while at Wharton, at age 28.
  
• In 2007, Bill Gates personally asked Omar Hamoui to speak at Microsoft's annual gathering of journalists, according to a July 207 Ad Age article. Gates had just bought one of Hamoui's competitors.
  
• Last year, toured Kara Swisher of All Things D through his cramped headquarters in San Mateo, a town on the San Francisco Peninsula not exactly famous as a startup hotbed. (See below).
  
• Google bought AdMob after attempting to launch a mobile ad network of its own (AdSense Mobile).

(Pic: Hamoui by Rodrigo SEPÚLVEDA SCHULZ )

Socketside heard Cruise was the buyer of an $18 million mansion in the ritzy Sea Cliff neighborhood. NBC Bay Area soon pointed out that, if that's true, Cruise's neighbors would be Robin Williams, Cheech Marin and the guitarist from Metallica. It's like the Bay Area's very own stunted little fog-swept Beverly Hills. But many locals will remember that the Church of Scientology was on the hunt for "apparent expansion" space starting in 2006, nosing around the once countercultural North Beach neighborhood.

So is Cruise, the alleged inspirer of Scientology beat-downs, spearheading a renewed expansion campaign by the cult to which he belongs? Maybe, or maybe said SF mansion is just being bought by another local tech exec like Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, per a SocketSite update:

Another reader quickly notes the mailing address for the purchasing LLC ("Tawaraya") is that of "a high-end accounting firm in Walnut Creek" which happens to advise Larry Ellison (amongst others). And The Real Estalker adds, "Tawaraya is a super posh and searingly expensive, 300-year old ryokan–which is essentially a Japanese bed and breakfast sort of place–located in Kyoto" which is rather Ellison-esque.

Oh great, more Larry Ellison dick waving. Don't we at least deserve some fresh megalomaniac mansion owners, out here?

Garmin is known for its GPS navigation systems, including mobile units consumers use while driving. The company might find a bright future in idiot-proof phone muters. Clip above.

(Pic: Chris N. on Flickr)

That's basically what he told his employee in a Sky News Interview, excerpted above:

Q: You could choose not to be on their search engine... so when someone runs a search your websites won't come up.


A: Well, I think we will... when we start charging.

This is certainly technically possible; all it takes is one correctly-placed text file to tell Google to ignore some or all of a website. And who knows, Murdoch's armies of lawyers and lobbyists might even succeed in effecting the other drastic change he mentioned: rolling back the entire doctrine of fair use, an interpretation of copyright law that allows the sort of quoting and selective reproduction of content that Murdoch's newspapers and TV networks engage in every day.

This isn't the first time Murdoch, 78, and his lieutenants have been made unfriendly noises about Google; they've recently attacked the search engine as a "parasite" with "promiscuous" users. This hostility must seem perfectly sensible if you're an old man who has your secretary find and print up Web pages on your behalf. But here's a pro tip, Rupert: Old media doesn't instant message those pages to your assistant's Twitter, via Blogger, on AOL. She just does what your newspaper reporters and Fox News producers and sales executives and tabloid editors and attack-dog flacks and mid-level accountants do all the time every day: Sticks a hot, throbbing search query into Google and gets busy with a bunch of strange website she doesn't subscribe to. Welcome to the internet.

British writer and analyst Charles Leadbeater, and researcher Annika Wong, have put together a report called Cloud Culture to be published by the British Council next year. Their statistical study, provided to me by Leadbeater, is based on figures from the social media analytics company Sysomos. It shows that such a tiny proportion of Iranians are on Twitter that any stories about a new movement based on the social network are meaningless. The figure they provide, by they way, includes the thousands of foreigners who changed their Twitter location to Tehran when the 'Iranian internet revolution' story struck after the elections in June and Facebook and Twitter were afire with Iran sentiment. So the likely figure is even lower.

The report adds that only one third of Iranians have internet access at all. And because opposition supporters are young, and on the internet, and Ahmadinejad supporters tend to be older and rural, the picture on the ground is likely skewed by any analysis that relies on tweets.

Leadbeater and Wong also compile a series of hyperbolic quotes from a variety of media sources at the time of the protests:

• "Twitter has become a key information conduit as the authorities in Tehran have cracked down on reporting by traditional media." Chris Nuttall and Daniel Dombey, Financial Times.
• "After disputed election results and massive street demonstrations in Tehran, Iran, information is flooding out of the country – on Twitter." Ashley Terry, Global News.
• "This is it. The big one." Clay Shirky of NYU.
• "We've been struck by the amount of video and eyewitness testimony... The days when regimes can control the flow of information are over." Jon Williams, BBC World News editor.

The meme was just too tempting, it seems, for anyone to dig into its veracity. The media — this site included — loves to write about Twitter, and loved doing so even more in summer when it was even newer and shiner. The storyline also fit the fact that Iran is a young country, and chimed with the heartbreaking YouTube video of the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan.

The solidarity that thousands, even millions of Americans showed with the people of Iran during June's elections and the subsequent protests was admirable. It was also potentially dangerous. I was at the UN protests against President Ahmadinejad earlier this fall. Several young men were wearing dust masks they had purchased from hardware stores. I asked one why. "I am wearing it because I have to go back to Iran," said a softly-spoken and shy 28-year-old student who gave his name only as Mohammed. "I return next year and this is for safety, in case they are watching," he added, pointing to his mask. "It could be the best $3 I ever spend."

If Mohammed is picked up despite his dust mask, the fact that the protests in Tehran were partly fomented by Western support based on a false story about Twitter will be of no consolation. It's probably not much comfort to these people either.

Wonderwall's Alex Blagg was just trying to be social, geeez.

Print media is to remain in its room until it feels well enough to stop destroying the company. Wired.com's Brian X. Chen didn't specifically say that, but it's the sort of Si Newhouse conference call we like to imagine.

Ubiquitous Silicon Valley flack Brooke Hammerling, recently tweeting from Mexico, got burned by some kind of suave foreigner.

TechCrunch's Sarah Lacy, recently tweeting from India, said overemotional self-centered Americans could learn a thing or two from waking up in another country. Let's hope so!

Lt. Dangle's R&B career was stillborn

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Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom are dropping suits against eBay, to whom they sold Skype in 2005, and against a consortium of private finance companies trying to buy Skype from eBay. The founders had accused both groups of intellectual property theft. They're dropping those lawsuits in exchange for 14 percent of Skype.

But former Wall Street Journal reporter Kara Swisher reported last night on Dow Jones' All Things D website that the founders would get not 14 percent but up to 13 percent of the company — 10 percent outright and an option to buy another 3 percent. Sacrebleu! Rob Wauters of rival TechCrunch was quick to rub Swisher's face in the minor error, writing that the founders "are getting 14 percent of Skype back for rights to the... technology their company... controls... and not 10% like previously reported by other media" (emphasis from original). Meow!

The press release issued by Skype actually confirmed Swisher's reporting that the founders had to put in money to get some of their shares. Swisher later acknowledged that the figure was 14 percent, just one percent higher than she had written. But she also engaged in a lengthy Twitter fight with Wauters and his colleague Erick Schonfeld (see below) over their public nitpicking and fact-bending. Maybe everyone involved in this fracas needs to take the next couple of days off. Oh, look at the calendar!

(Top pic via)