Tickets in hand and rooms booked at the “Premier Choice of Las Vegas Hotels and Resorts“, a bunch of us here at Me.dium are heading to Vegas Baby! (seriously, have you ever been on a plane heading to Vegas and NOT heard someone yell that out loud before you landed?   Me neither.)  That’s right, the Me.dium Crew, or “Team Me.dium” as we prefer to be called, is crashing the bash at MIX 08, Microsoft’s annual all-out shindig with web designers, developers, and business decision makers this Wednesday through Friday.

Aside from a truckload of glad-handing and rubbing shoulders with some of the best in the business, one of the big things we look forward to doing is grabbing some stage time at Open Space.  In our never-ending quest to make the Web a more social place, we’ve got some great new ideas for  social browsing features that we’ve been working on and look forward to getting down and dirty with other developers dealing with similar challenges and opportunities.

• How else can you benefit from the browsing activities of others?
• New ways can you interact online with your friends and others that  change how you think about being online from a solitary experience to more of a real-world experience?
• Can others help you discover new and interesting things that you would have never seen before?

Yes, we’re prepared to attack these along with many other socially-driven questions regarding your browsing habits and we look forward to kicking it back and forth with developers that have been neck deep in the same challenges and opportunities.

We’re shooting for Wednesday around 3pm, PST and since Me.dium let’s you join in the fun, please feel free to hop on and let us know what you think in real time!

 UPDATE:  We’re now on stage at 1pm PST Tomorrow.  Wait for it…Big News!

FINAL UPDATE:  Facebook finally gets religion…(but it’s too easy to read between the lines…) 
UPDATE: It seems Facebook has changed the Opt-Out process to an Opt-In process. That’s a move in the right direction in response to users and feedback. Good on them. But, do we REALLY want Facebook knowing that much about us? I guess the number of users that stop using Facebook as a result will be the gauge. Let’s wait and see…

That’s the quote from today’s New York Times article on Facebook’s new ad service, “Beacon.” In short, for those not as completely engrossed in this ongoing debate as I am, Facebook is now tracking and broadcasting purchases you make on OTHER websites across your friend network. The goal here is to make money by selling ads next to those purchase notices.

Another one of my favorite quotes from the article:

“Whenever we innovate and create great new experiences and new features, if they are not well understood at the outset, one thing we need to do is give people an opportunity to interact with them,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, a vice president at Facebook. “After a while, they fall in love with them.”

Sounds a bit scary to me. Not so much that Facebook is doing it, but more so that they aren’t really giving users any real time control over when and how it happens. They claim it’s opt-in. But what does that mean? If it’s a small notice that’s hard to discern that pops up as you purchase something asking you to take some kind of action if you DON’T want that purchase shared, then that just doesn’t cut it for me.

The value of sharing activity across your social graph has already been proven, or accepted. But once that sharing starts to reach across social network borders, we need to rethink the control and visibility in the process. I know that my friends on Facebook know what I’m doing on Facebook and I act accordingly when I’m interacting with Facebook as a result? I know everyone that follows my Twitter Stream knows hat I’m doing and thinking, and again, act accordingly. Do I want my friends to know what I’m doing when I’m off of Facebook? Sure, sometimes. And, probably not at other times. It’s not the conept that’s flawed, it’s the execution.

If I have visible, real-time, non-intrusive control over where, when and with whom I share my activities, then I am free to leverage that sharing in a way that makes my experience online (and off) better. If I am visibly aware that another party is getting access to my activities and probably gaining monetarily by them, then again, I can act accordingly and make decisions based on the value that I’m getting in return.

That’s the driving philosophy behind Me.dium. We know we provide a service that requires trust on the part of our users and can only succeed if we provide the control and value that justifies that trust. Why do others believe they have the right to get away without providing that control, visibility and value just because they’re worth a bunch of money? Because users have always “accepted” it in the past? Why don’t large companies remember what mom constantly used to say, “always say please, thank you and treat others the way you’d want to be treated?”

Is that really so hard? Hmmmmmm…

UPDATE: Coke is already balking!

If you’re an OS widget user, you’re going to love this! Me.dium Neighborhood widgets are now available on the OSX Dashboard and in the Vista Sidebar.

You can now view the Me.dium relevant content and people in a particular Me.dium Neighborhood, right from your desktop.

To set this up…

1. Install Amnesty Widgets.
2. Run “Amnesty Generator.”
3. Select “Google Gadgets”
4. Copy/Paste code from one of the Available Neighborhoods below, into the generator.
5. Give your widget a name, use “1234″ as the Identifier, width is 200, height is 230.
6. Click “Generate” and enjoy the full glory of a Me.dium Neighborhood on your desktop.

Available Neighborhoods

• Sports

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://me.dium.com/mapwidget/3336"></script>

• The 10th View

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://me.dium.com/mapwidget/3339"></script>

• Music

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://me.dium.com/mapwidget/3333"></script>

• Technology

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://me.dium.com/mapwidget/3338"></script>

• Gaming

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://me.dium.com/mapwidget/3337"></script>

• Humor

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://me.dium.com/mapwidget/3334"></script>

• Pop Culture

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://me.dium.com/mapwidget/3335"></script>

• News

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://me.dium.com/mapwidget/3332"></script>

I’ve been sitting here reading through the massive pile of posts I have in my RSS reader and suddenly something special came up. Mike Arrington of TechCrunch has confirmed by phone with the folks at Flickr that they’ve received their 2 Billionth photo upload. That is correct and you aren’t reading things wrong. 2 Billion! Grats to the folks at Flickr for achieving this milestone. Click here to read the article. 

My good friend Marshall Kirkpatrick over at Read/Write Web just posted a great article on Google’s recent announcement to host a contest for Android Mobile Developers.

Android Mobile OS was announced by Google last week. No gphone sadly but this OS promises to be pretty damn sweet. The SDK has been released and more information about the contest can be found here.