A Washington Post story tries to paint the tech environment Obama's staffers encountered as horrifyingly archaic:

Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.

What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking....

One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos.

Guess what? Outside the Manhattan media bubble and Silicon Valley's startup cube farms, this is how most Americans work. Want a Macintosh? Sorry, IT hasn't approved it. Oh, you need to use Facebook to interact with customers? Sorry, that site's blocked — and management suspects that "social media" is a buzzword which means "getting paid to waste time chatting with friends." Want to use some new blogging service? Fill out this three-page questionnaire about the site's security practices, please.

This is not a story about digital pioneers getting cast back into the Stone Age; it's about a privileged elite learning how the rest of the country has to work. Those "six-year-old versions of Microsoft software"? That must mean Windows XP. If you haven't noticed, most people still prefer XP over Microsoft's clunky, buggy, annoying new Vista. Here's a suggestion for the Obamans: Stop whining about the tools taxpayers have paid for, and get to work learning how to cope with what your employer gives you, just like the rest of us.

(Image via Futurenow/Robert Gorell)

Zuckerberg wrote an "Open Letter" post today, just three days after he advised us all to "Calm Down. Breathe." In the post, which appeared on every Facebook user's blog, he apologizes profusely to his constituents and thanks those who protested because they allowed him to create a better, higher quality product all the while engaging in some socially conscionable blah blah blah. We feel bad for the guy. His sappy, whiny open letter felt a little too Mel-Gibson-post-drunken-anti-semitic-rant. Be a man, Zuckerberg. Let the users cry, and stop crying back.

An Open Letter from Mark Zuckerberg [Facebook; photo from Rolling Stone]

Kiko's seller says that it must have been all his links to Kiko.com, which violated eBay's terms of service. (The Kiko founder then whines about eBay being so slow to catch Kiko's violation. With diplomatic skills like that, no wonder these kids couldn't broker a better deal for their company.)

Auction pulled from eBay!?!? [Kiko founder's blog]