Facebook showed off the power of this new location feature at a launch event this week with a giant projection of a U.S. map showing where people were checking in just moments after Places launched.  MG Siegler called it “Facebook’s Awesome Dark Knight-Esque Live Check-In Display.”  But it was one of the scariest things I’ve seen.

Facebook only showed people’s first names, but their databases know your last names and so much more about you.  To me, it looked exactly what the inside of Orwell’s Ministry of Love would have looked like. That government group was responsible for identifying and monitoring dissidents.

Of course, there are many important differences. Facebook is not the government.  Your location information is voluntarily given by you or your friends, not obtained from a vast network of telescreens (more on that later in the post.)  And, the information is kept private… well maybe.  Your friends can check you in without you knowing it until after the fact.

In a post yesterday, MG said “Places is actually pretty great — potentially”, but he acknowledged “the friend tagging thing is troubling to a lot of people (particularly because of the somewhat confusing three states.)” Agreed. He also wondered how long it would be until the big Facebook location backlash. Sorry, MG, I think it’s started.

I expect we will learn over time how many users allow friends to tag you, turn Places off, or stick to the default limbo land, where most users are now. Sure, some users are bound to be confused and their intentions won’t match their settings, resulting in some unhappy users. How long will it take for all of Facebook’s more than 500 million users to figure it out?

But, I want to focus on users who opt-in to allow tagging. Whether they are using location services to provide the “missing link between social networks and the real world” or because of peer pressure, do they realize or care they have just given up one last piece of their privacy? And that loss was initiated by themselves or their friends, people they trust.

Michael Arrington has argued that “privacy is already really, really dead.” He wrote

Everything we do, everything we buy, everywhere we go is tracked and sitting in a database somewhere. Our location via our phone, or our car GPS. Our credit card transactions. Everything.

Fair point. Sounds very 1984 already. But, in the actions he cited, the loss of privacy is mostly a side effect. It’s our choice to buy something, but the capturing of the credit card data is a side effect we have to endure. Using Places, the point is to lose some of your privacy — the quality or condition of being secluded from the presence or view of others — by voluntarily handing over your location information.

One commenter on Twitter wrote: “If the government were to go all “1984,” it’d [sic] be through Facebook. We’re all voluntarily signing away our privacy. Check your settings!”

The telescreen played a big role in Orwell’s 1984:

The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.

We all assumed the telescreen was the television. There was a telescreen in Winston Smith’s living room. But, there were also many telescreens out in public. I think the iPhone or a smartphone could be considered a telescreen too.

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course
no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How
often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual
wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all
the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted
to. You had to live–did live, from habit that became instinct–in the
assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in
darkness, every movement scrutinized.

That sounds like a smartphone plus Google Maps with Street View.  We do turn off our TV’s, but for many, it’s much harder to turn our phones off. Now we are both transmitting and receiving information with these mobile devices. And with Places on, we can be watched (tagged) at any given moment. We are certainly not in a place where they watch everybody all the time, but rather we are all watching each other.

I know many users will love Places and what it can do. They won’t care about the loss of privacy. Some of us, including me, still value the tiny amount of privacy we still have. We don’t want to be a dot appearing on Facebook’s live map. So, we’ll choose to opt-out for now.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post penned by Michael Cole, Managing Director of RightSite.asia, China’s largest online marketplace for commercial and industrial real estate. Cole has also successfully launched, grown and profitably exited from media ventures in China.

After a modest amount of time observing China’s economy it becomes clear that the government likes to arrange organized competition in industries it considers strategic. Thus the country gets three major airlines—China Eastern, China Southern and Air China—as well as three major mobile phone networks in China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom.

Now, with the recent announcement of two major new search engine companies, it appears that search is joining transportation, phone networks and Internet service providers as a strategic industry to be managed more directly by the government. And maybe China will soon have three search giants to match up with its telephone and airline triplets.

The first search engine deal announced two weeks ago was an alliance between ecommerce giant Alibaba and online portal Sohu to upgrade Sohu’s existing search product, Sogou.com. In a statement on Monday, August 9th, Sohu announced that Alibaba and Yunfeng, an investment fund cofounded by Alibaba’s chairman, Jack Ma, would be buying 16 percent of Sogou.

Another 16 percent of the company would be invested by a fund affiliated with Sohu chaiman Charles Zhang. And Sogou could use the help. In a search market dominated by Baidu with a 70% share, and Google with 24.2%, Sogou currently ranks third, but has only 0.8% market share according to recent market research by third party analysts.

The second, and more surprising deal was a link-up announced two Fridays ago between Xinhua and China Mobile to start yet another search engine. Xinhua, a news agency belonging to the central government which also acts as a propaganda organ and sometimes intelligence gathering body, and China’s largest cellular carrier seem like unusual partners for an Internet venture, and the exact terms of the transaction have yet to be announced.

The New York Times described the deal as follows:

In an apparent bid to extend its control over the Internet and cash in on the rapid growth of mobile devices, China plans to create a government-controlled search engine.

While these two new search engine ventures being announced in a single week, particularly so closely following the recent Google controversy, could be a coincidence, very few major transactions in an economy that is still largely government-controlled happen in such a random way.

Although Baidu, Sohu and Alibaba are all private companies, and thus very different creatures from state-owned enterprises such as China Mobile or the airlines, in practice China’s government requires any large media enterprise to be closely aligned with the bureaucracy and these major firms often serve as unofficial market champions for the nation, particularly once they have gone public and become internationally recognizable symbols of the country’s media markets.

At the same time, the government is careful not to have any market dominated too much by a single company and it actively works to encourage (and organize) some competition among industry heavyweights. Thus the airline industry was split into three companies from a single parent, and part of the 3G market was set aside for the lesser cell phone players, China Unicom and China Telecom.

Now a similar scenario seems to be appearing in search and it most likely means that the government is taking search engines seriously as a strategic national interest. (Bad news if you are Google). In a story that Xinhua published regarding its new joint venture with China Mobile, the news agency portrayed its search engine enterprise in a directly political manner.

According to the report, the new search engine is intended to “better serve the work of the Party and the nation and to practically protect national interests … and to expand the reach and the ability in and outside China of the country’s mainstream media to guide public opinion.”

While that mission statement would seem to doom the new search product with consumers, the massive market penetration of China Mobile could give the new project a significant advantage with mobile users.

While it is too early to tell what will happen in China’s search market, if the moves last week were officially sanctioned measures to “harmonize” the market, there could be some moves in the pipeline to curb Baidu’s dominance and provide a boost to the new players. This could take the form of reserving parts of newly developing markets for the newcomers or through other measures designed to keep a perceived competitive balance in the market.

The other side of this equation is that if this recognition of search as a strategic industry is happening as speculated here, then opportunities for Google or other international companies to achieve gains in the market are likely to all but disappear.

While China welcomes foreign investment in most industries, it is still ambivalent about international involvement in the media sector, particularly with regard to consumer-facing products. Anything which smacks of mass media is likely to be all but closed off to foreign involvement, and search, with its ability to lead users to new information may be seen as too strategic to be left to the open market.

For those Samsung Galaxy S-loving purists out there, you’ll be pleased to know that there is an option around the corner. Stock Android 2.1 has been running just fine on the Galaxy S, though there are some issues at this early stage in the game, namely the camera application not functioning. Once all the bugs are worked out, how many of you would rather run stock Android than Samsung’s TouchWiz interface?

It must be a perplexing time for the company, as The New York Times reports, in deciding whether to ignore the movie and hope that it dusts into oblivion, or to fight back — legally or otherwise — to prevent it from misrepresenting the company and its CEO as it sets out to become the cultural sensation that it promises.

But with names like David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin attached, a trailer that’s received a fairly positive response, and a marketing campaign that makes it clear that the movie is no made-for-TV HBO documentary, the bets are against the former.

So far, the talks between the producers of the movie and Facebook have been glum. As a part of its privacy policy which prevents advertisers from using the Facebook brand name, the movie is barred from advertising on its platform, though it has been permitted a low-profile fan page. On the flipside, the producer of the movie, Scott Rudin, has shown it to top executives Elliot Schrage and Sheryl Sandberg, and admits candidly that “they did not like it.”

Zuckerberg himself has been open about his distaste for the movie. In a recent onstage interview at the Computer History Museum, he wrote it off as being fiction, and admitted that he wasn’t planning to see it, just like he hasn’t read “The Accidental Billionaires”, the book on which its screenplay is based on.

“They had two choices of books to base it on, and they chose to base it on a fiction book,” he stated in the interview. “I wish that when people try to do journalism or write stuff about Facebook, that they at least try to get it right.”

David Kirkpatrick, the author of “The Facebook Effect”, thinks that there is a chance, given how many details in the movie are distorted, that the company might be “forced to deliver a forceful rebuttal once the film has its premiere, especially if it turned out to be a hit,” according to the New York Times article.

The idea of this is obviously appealing to Kirkpatrick, who is behind the ‘other’ non-fiction book Zuckerberg cited in the statement and has been open about backing — he permitted Kirkpatrick to interview him for the book and has given joint interviews with Kirkpatrick himself, such as the one at the Computer History Museum, to promote the book.

If there is ever another ‘Facebook movie,’ there is little question that it would be based on Kirkpatrick’s non-fictional and heavily researched account of the story; one he has crafted based on actual interviews with the people involved rather than legendary folktales and fictional fillers.

So, one wonders: If “The Social Network” turns out to be a “Wall Street” — and not just a “Pirates of Silicon Valley” — could the company want to clear the air and make its own version of the tale?

Beware the trappings of liquidation preference – If you’re working on your initial round of funding and don’t know much about liquidation preference, look out. It’s the second most important deal term you’ll negotiate and it could have big implications on what you earn if your company is sold. Attorney Scott Edward Walker explains the term and its importance.

5 business apps every entrepreneur should have – There are a ton of apps out there, but figuring out which are best for startup owners can be tricky. Writer Shannon Suetos runs down five you can’t live without.

Why getting 10 customers is all that matters – While there’s no shortage of people ready to launch startups, only a miniscule percentage of those have found people willing to pay for their product or service. Angel investor Jason Cohen takes aim at entrepreneurs’ lame excuses for not doing this.

8 things I wish I knew before starting a business – Startups are great adventures, but they’re also rife with opportunities for mistakes and failure. Don Rainey, general partner at Grotech Ventures, lists the eight most important things he has learned through his career.

EC Book Review: “Wired for War,” by P.W. Singer – A book on the advances in warfare might seem an odd choice for entrepreneurs, but Javier Rojas notes that this look at robotics can give startups insight into one of the fastest growing market opportunities out there.

Fifty-two percent of Silicon Valley’s startups from 1995 to 2005 were founded by foreign-born workers. And in 2006, 26% of America’s global patents—including 40% of those filed by the U.S. government, 72% of Qualcomm’s, 65% of Merck & Co.’s, and 64% of General Electric’s—were invented wholly or partly by foreign nationals residing in the U.S. You would think that we would develop policies to bring in more of these people. Yet, sadly, the only immigration legislation our political leaders have been able to agree on, unanimously, is to hire 1000 more border-patrol agents and to fly drones on the Mexico border—like the ones we use to kill terrorists in Pakistan—to keep the nannies, gardeners, and farm workers out. Ironically, to pay for all this, the new border-security law levies taxes on companies that the bill’s sponsor, Senator Schumer (D-NY), calls “chop shops”—because they bring in tech workers who compete with Americans and supposedly “take their jobs away”. These “chop shops” are Indian companies such as Infosys, Tata Consulting Services, and Wipro—which have the best employee-training and -development programs, and are amongst the best-managed companies, in the world. They compete head to head with American “chop shops” such as IBM Global Services and Accenture, and increasingly with management consultants such as McKinsey & Co and The Boston Consulting Group.

I am opposed to illegal immigration and believe that H1-B visas should be abolished. (If we need skilled workers, bring them in as permanent residents, so that they have the same rights as Americans and can switch jobs if an employer underpays them.) But the political debate has degenerated into nothing but racism and xenophobia. Some politicians are simply pandering to uninformed sectors of their electorates.

Meanwhile, countries such as Russia, Singapore, and Chile are doing what they can to build their own Silicon Valleys. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev visited Silicon Valley last month, to let American techies know that they are welcome to move to his new science park. Singapore has long been offering visas and incentives to any skilled worker who moves there. And Chile has launched the most ambitious program of all.

In addition to the incentives that Chile has been offering established tech companies, it took my advice and announced an ambitious new program for bootstrappers, called Startup Chile.  In return for hanging out in one of the most beautiful places on this planet, Chile will provide fledgling entrepreneurs with a grant of $40,000 to help them cover expenses for six months ($40,000 goes a long way in South America, by the way). As well, they’ll provide the entrepreneurs free temporary office space; connect them with mentors, VCs, and angels; and help them settle in. They are also pumping money into local VC funds to ensure that the capital is there for the most promising companies.

A handful of entrepreneurs have already signed up for the program, and Chile’s  minister of Economy, Juan Andres Fontaine, is coming to Silicon Valley on Sept 21 to meet two dozen more entrepreneurs who he hopes will return to Chile with him. (Here is the link to apply.) Chile wants to lure hundreds of entrepreneurs, eventually.

Seems too good to be true, doesn’t it? No obligation to stay; no equity ownership in return for the money; no onerous contracts that promise a pound of flesh—as VCs typically demand. Why would Chile do this? Because they’re betting that if they get enough smart, talented people there, three things will happen: first, many of the entrepreneurs going there will fall in love with the country and decide to stay; second, they will enrich the local ecosystem by teaching local entrepreneurs about global markets; and third, their tech community will develop stronger links to the world. Who knows, a couple of startups may also hit home runs. After all, isn’t this how Silicon Valley left tech centers like Boston in the dust and became the world’s tech leader?

Chile’s strategy of attracting skilled immigrants makes a lot of sense when you consider that it costs practically nothing compared with the billions that regions invest in creating industry clusters. The fact is that smart people, when given the education and means to innovate, make the magic happen. And that’s what makes the American immigration policies so troubling: we’re chasing away the highly educated and experienced workers who could be boosting our economy. They are instead turning countries like China and India into major tech centers.

America won’t always be the place to which the world’s best and brightest flock—they will go where they feel the most welcome. And it won’t be long before Senator Schumer or his successor has to sponsor legislation to offer “chop-shops” incentives, like those Chile is offering, to bring skilled workers to the U.S.

Thursday, Google announced that it added support for browser-based voice and video chat in Debian-based Linux distributions. If you rock Ubuntu, or any Debian-flavored OS, you can head over to gmail.com/videochat to download the plugin. The full text of the post is below:

If you’ve been wanting to use voice and video chat on Linux (our top video chat request), then we have good news for you: it’s now available! Visit gmail.com/videochat to download the plugin and get started. Voice and video chat for Linux supports Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions, and RPM support will be coming soon.

On Friday’s taping of Gillmor Gang with former TechCrunchIT Editor Steve Gillmor, Kevin Marks and John Taschek, Crowley discussed the opportunity for places, outlined his plan for the next iteration of Foursquare and knocked Google for its social awkwardness. While his disgust with Google’s mismanagement of the ill-fated Dodgeball is well documented, in his explanation you don’t need to read between the lines to understand he’s also talking about Facebook and how he plans to beat Goliath.

“It’s difficult to build services that are supposed to scale to you know 30, 50, 100 million users right off the bat, because they got to be kind of tailored down, by definition they have to be a little bit generic to speak to that large of an audience. And one of the benefits that we get from starting from scratch and starting as a mobile, social, local startup is that we start with zero users and we can put whatever personality and whatever face we want to on the product… Part of what you see on Foursquare, which is the game mechanics and the snarkiness and really more importantly like the fun and the playfulness that we build into the product, because I think that’s the stuff that most people relate to. And you can poo-poo how like those touchy-feely things don’t mean too much to users but I really think that’s the core and kind of the soul of the service and people identify with that.”

Still not convinced that Crowley’s painting the picture of Facebook as a generic-borderline-boring service, versus Foursquare, the hip, edgy, playful alternative? Let’s step back and consider recent evidence. Earlier this week, Crowley blasted a seemingly harmless tweet: “Call from my 86 yr old grandma: ‘Hello. I want to know if this Face-Book is like yours. It sounds like Four-Squared, but without the fun.’”

In a word, that’s what Crowley has brought to this undercover dogfight: fun.

Although it may sound silly, Crowley’s argument is logically sound. The core of “fun” is his most potent weapon to staying relevant.

Facebook is so huge (500 million large versus Foursquare’s 2.8 million) that its check-in service has to be simple and minimal to accommodate such a huge and diverse group— anything too quirky or outlandish runs the risk of alienating factions. While Foursquare cannot dream to compete with Facebook’s installed base, the startup can certainly differentiate itself by offering a creative, more dynamic product that is less utilitarian and more personality-driven.

As Crowley explains on the Gillmor gang show, he does believe that Facebook has a major role to play in the location ecosystem. Facebook can aggregate check-ins from different services and introduce new users (millions upon millions of them) to the world of check-ins. Thus, if Facebook stays in its corner, the relationship could be a very symbiotic one for Foursquare, which saw a record number of sign-ups on Thursday.

In the meantime, Foursquare is certainly not content to just wait and watch this play out. The rapidly expanding team is working hard to push out the new version within the next two weeks. Crowley, who says he’s “embarrassed” by Foursquare’s current game mechanics, says the next iterations of Foursquare will focus on “reworking and rethinking…the way the tips and the to-dos work, because that’s going to be core of the system.”

In other words, when it comes to the basic check-in, Facebook can be the king of the hill, but when it comes to creating the most engaging, valuable location experience, Crowley is ready for a fight.

Below are highlights from the Gillmor Gang show/ or see video above:

On the opportunities with Places
“I think there’s been a lot of folks who’ve tried to do… check-in aggregation services in the past and ultimately I think that’s going to be, that’s probably a good thing for the industry just so it’s not as fragmented…We’ve been looking at their API and playing with it a little bit, there’s a good chance we’re going to push our check-ins into the facebook feed and there’s a good chance we’re going to pull their check-ins out of it. But I think the big win here, just as Twitter and Facebook taught the world how to share things online photos and status updates and social commentary, I think Facebook is going to teach the world what check-ins are all about.”

On the differences between Places/Foursquare
“We don’t ignore the past. I think one of the great things about Foursquare is that we got a critical mass of users that interact with us two or three minutes every day. Like they do three or five check-ins, on a daily basis that’s not a lot of content, not a lot of data that we’re getting…but over the course of weeks and months it ends up being a lot interesting data about the types of places that people go, the types of things they enjoy doing, the types of people they hang out with. You can cut that stuff up and recycle it back to the users in…lots of interesting ways and I think that’s going to be a big opportunity for us.”

On the problem with Foursquare’s game mechanics
“I think the game mechanics, they really need a lot of work. They really need a lot of improvement, there’s a lot of stuff in the product that we’re not happy about, there’s a lot of stuff I’m kind of like embarrassed about, there’s a lot of things that we need to fix. And people love it as it is. Another big push that you’re going to see from us in the next couple of months is redefining and redeveloping a lot of these game mechanics. Just because we’ve gotten much smarter about it. And I think once we start applying a lot of the stuff we’ve learned to the stuff we’ve already built, then we’ll really start to blow people away.”

The next iteration
“The next version of the Foursquare app comes out in probably like two weeks or so and we’re really reworking and rethinking like the way the tips and the to-dos work, because that’s going to be core of the system. …We’ve been thinking for awhile, what’s act two for us? And act two is OK let’s take all this information about what people are doing, what people want to do, and let’s build this back into the app in a way that’s manageable for people and easy to share.”

On Google’s location/social strategy
“I think they’ve just always struggled with social. That could be an entire different, an hour long conversation over what is it with social that they don’t get… My belief has always been that in order for services to take off in the near term, in order for them to develop that passionate user base of people that go out and turn into advocates. The services need to have some kind of personality to them and some kind of identity to them and I think it’s really difficult and I felt like we ran into some of this when we were at Google. It’s difficult to build services that are supposed to scale to you know 30, 50, 100 million users right off the bat, because they got to be kind of tailored down, by definition they have to be a little bit generic to speak to that large of an audience. And one of the benefits that we get from starting from scratch and starting as a mobile, social, local startup is that we start with zero users and we can put whatever personality and whatever face we want to on the product. Part of what you see on Foursquare, which is the game mechanics and the snarkiness and really more importantly like the fun and the playfulness that we build into the product, because I think that’s the stuff that most people relate to. And you can poo-poo how like those touchy-feely things don’t mean too much to users but I really think that’s the core and kind of the soul of the service and people identify with that.”

On Friday’s taping of Gillmor Gang with former TechCrunchIT Editor Steve Gillmor, Kevin Marks and John Taschek, Crowley discussed the opportunity for places, outlined his plan for the next iteration of Foursquare and knocked Google for its social awkwardness. While his disgust with Google’s mismanagement of the ill-fated Dodgeball is well documented, in his explanation you don’t need to read between the lines to understand he’s also talking about Facebook and how he plans to beat Goliath.

“It’s difficult to build services that are supposed to scale to you know 30, 50, 100 million users right off the bat, because they got to be kind of tailored down, by definition they have to be a little bit generic to speak to that large of an audience. And one of the benefits that we get from starting from scratch and starting as a mobile, social, local startup is that we start with zero users and we can put whatever personality and whatever face we want to on the product… Part of what you see on Foursquare, which is the game mechanics and the snarkiness and really more importantly like the fun and the playfulness that we build into the product, because I think that’s the stuff that most people relate to. And you can poo-poo how like those touchy-feely things don’t mean too much to users but I really think that’s the core and kind of the soul of the service and people identify with that.”

Still not convinced that Crowley’s painting the picture of Facebook as a generic-borderline-boring service, versus Foursquare, the hip, edgy, playful alternative? Let’s step back and consider recent evidence. Earlier this week, Crowley blasted a seemingly harmless tweet: “Call from my 86 yr old grandma: ‘Hello. I want to know if this Face-Book is like yours. It sounds like Four-Squared, but without the fun.’”

In a word, that’s what Crowley has brought to this undercover dogfight: fun.

Although it may sound silly, Crowley’s argument is logically sound. The core of “fun” is his most potent weapon to staying relevant.

Facebook is so huge (500 million large versus Foursquare’s 2.8 million) that its check-in service has to be simple and minimal to accommodate such a huge and diverse group— anything too quirky or outlandish runs the risk of alienating factions. While Foursquare cannot dream to compete with Facebook’s installed base, the startup can certainly differentiate itself by offering a creative, more dynamic product that is less utilitarian and more personality-driven.

As Crowley explains on the Gillmor gang show, he does believe that Facebook has a major role to play in the location ecosystem. Facebook can aggregate check-ins from different services and introduce new users (millions upon millions of them) to the world of check-ins. Thus, if Facebook stays in its corner, the relationship could be a very symbiotic one for Foursquare, which saw a record number of sign-ups on Thursday.

In the meantime, Foursquare is certainly not content to just wait and watch this play out. The rapidly expanding team is working hard to push out the new version within the next two weeks. Crowley, who says he’s “embarrassed” by Foursquare’s current game mechanics, says the next iterations of Foursquare will focus on “reworking and rethinking…the way the tips and the to-dos work, because that’s going to be core of the system.”

In other words, when it comes to the basic check-in, Facebook can be the king of the hill, but when it comes to creating the most engaging, valuable location experience, Crowley is ready for a fight.

Below are highlights from the Gillmor Gang show/ or see video above:

On the opportunities with Places
“I think there’s been a lot of folks who’ve tried to do… check-in aggregation services in the past and ultimately I think that’s going to be, that’s probably a good thing for the industry just so it’s not as fragmented…We’ve been looking at their API and playing with it a little bit, there’s a good chance we’re going to push our check-ins into the facebook feed and there’s a good chance we’re going to pull their check-ins out of it. But I think the big win here, just as Twitter and Facebook taught the world how to share things online photos and status updates and social commentary, I think Facebook is going to teach the world what check-ins are all about.”

On the differences between Places/Foursquare
“We don’t ignore the past. I think one of the great things about Foursquare is that we got a critical mass of users that interact with us two or three minutes every day. Like they do three or five check-ins, on a daily basis that’s not a lot of content, not a lot of data that we’re getting…but over the course of weeks and months it ends up being a lot interesting data about the types of places that people go, the types of things they enjoy doing, the types of people they hang out with. You can cut that stuff up and recycle it back to the users in…lots of interesting ways and I think that’s going to be a big opportunity for us.”

On the problem with Foursquare’s game mechanics
“I think the game mechanics, they really need a lot of work. They really need a lot of improvement, there’s a lot of stuff in the product that we’re not happy about, there’s a lot of stuff I’m kind of like embarrassed about, there’s a lot of things that we need to fix. And people love it as it is. Another big push that you’re going to see from us in the next couple of months is redefining and redeveloping a lot of these game mechanics. Just because we’ve gotten much smarter about it. And I think once we start applying a lot of the stuff we’ve learned to the stuff we’ve already built, then we’ll really start to blow people away.”

The next iteration
“The next version of the Foursquare app comes out in probably like two weeks or so and we’re really reworking and rethinking like the way the tips and the to-dos work, because that’s going to be core of the system. …We’ve been thinking for awhile, what’s act two for us? And act two is OK let’s take all this information about what people are doing, what people want to do, and let’s build this back into the app in a way that’s manageable for people and easy to share.”

On Google’s location/social strategy
“I think they’ve just always struggled with social. That could be an entire different, an hour long conversation over what is it with social that they don’t get… My belief has always been that in order for services to take off in the near term, in order for them to develop that passionate user base of people that go out and turn into advocates. The services need to have some kind of personality to them and some kind of identity to them and I think it’s really difficult and I felt like we ran into some of this when we were at Google. It’s difficult to build services that are supposed to scale to you know 30, 50, 100 million users right off the bat, because they got to be kind of tailored down, by definition they have to be a little bit generic to speak to that large of an audience. And one of the benefits that we get from starting from scratch and starting as a mobile, social, local startup is that we start with zero users and we can put whatever personality and whatever face we want to on the product. Part of what you see on Foursquare, which is the game mechanics and the snarkiness and really more importantly like the fun and the playfulness that we build into the product, because I think that’s the stuff that most people relate to. And you can poo-poo how like those touchy-feely things don’t mean too much to users but I really think that’s the core and kind of the soul of the service and people identify with that.”

On why the world needs more than one social graph

Our social graph is more representative of the people that you meet in the real world. I am starting to believe, if you asked me a year ago, Why would you ever need more than one social graph? You need representation of a couple of them. Between the three, Facebook is literally everyone I’ve ever shaken hands with at a conference or kissed on the cheek at Easter. Twitter seems to be everyone I am entertained by or I wish to meet some day. Foursquare seems to be everyone I run into on a regular basis. All three of those social graphs are powerful in their own

Facebook Connect came along and it really made the social graph open to everyone and makes building social apps easier. We think, oh, we are just building our social graphs on top of Facebook . But Facebook could benefit from our social graph, and Facebook could benefit from Twitter’s social graph. You maybe are not just sucking data out of one, and that is the end of it, but maybe sucking data out of one and putting it in another and they are all working to make each other a little more powerful and a little more accurate.

Clearly, this man is a marketing genius. What better way is there to get the word out about its device — which we initially caught word of in early July — than saying it’ll be better than a highly successful Apple product.

Surely none of the other hardware manufacturers preparing Android tablets — which at this point includes Asus, Acer, Dell, and many others — actually think their devices stand a chance against the iPad. LG, through its complex oratory jiujitsu, has declared itself the next king of tablets — despite the fact that we know practically nothing about the Optimus tablet.

All we have to go on now is nothing more than vague promises. “It’s going to be surprisingly productive,” Ma said. Users will be able to write documents, edit video, and it will have some “high-end features and new benefits” with a productivity bent.

He reiterated the sentiment of many iPad critics who deride the device as something primarily meant for content consumption, rather than productivity. But while I would agree that the iPad isn’t an ideal productivity device, nothing about LG’s Optimus tablet seems to be any more productive. iPad users can already create documents, and there are existing apps like ReelDirector for video editing (Apple will certainly release an iMovie app for the iPad as well).

There aren’t any hardware details for LG’s Optimus tablet yet, but you can expect a screen around 10 inches, and enough power under the hood to run Android 3.0 (to be released later this year). LG expects to launch the tablet worldwide by the fourth quarter.

In other news, the company is also revamping its smartphone line in September with the release of the Android-powered Optimus One. The phone won’t be a hardware powerhouse, but LG expects it to be a “gateway smartphone” for new users. Eventually, it will release more powerful Android devices. The company has plans to use Nvidia’s dual-core CPU in the fourth quarter, and it’s also gearing up for 4G phones running LTE technology in 2011.