Reuters said that Musk departed because the group funded ads for senators vocalizing support for the oil pipeline, the Keystone pipeline, and oil drilling in Alaska. Think Progress reported last month that Fwd.us has spent a considerable amount of money on these anti-environmental ads. Various environmental groups have been protesting the ad funding.

Musk is the CEO of electric car company Tesla Motors, and the chairman of solar installer SolarCity. Sacks is the founder of Yammer, which was sold to Microsoft last year. Other members of Fwd.us include Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Dropbox’s Drew Houston and many others including Facebook alumni.

Our own Om Malik weighed in on Fwd.us last month, and took issue to its angle, not necessarily to its fossil fuel ad funding:

If Mark and others really cared deeply about immigration reform on a holistic level then the conversation would involve a whole lot of other people — members of non-engineering and non-technology corps. So, no, I don’t buy that just because an immigrant works on an algorithm make her more important. I know, because I am one. Perhaps FWD.us and Zuckerberg should start actually learning about the whole and real problem: a society disrupted in connected age.

Updated at 1:45 PM PST, on May 13, to correct that eBay’s CEO John Donahoe was not originally a member of FWD.us, and was incorrectly listed on Credo’s petition calling for tech leaders to leave the group, as well as incorrectly reported on various media sites.

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In a blog post, the company described the update, which will be available on Instagram for iOS and Android:

“There will now be a Photos of You section on your profile. When someone adds you to a photo, you’ll receive a notification and the photo will appear in your Photos of You. Want to make sure you like the photo first? No problem: you can easily adjust your settings so nothing appears on your profile until you approve it. Before your Photos of You section is visible to other people, you’ll have until May 16th to play around and get used to the feature.”

Tagging someone is different than just mentioning them in a comment, so photos you’ve previously been @-mentioned on will not appear on your profile page immediately.

The focus on people and tagging your friends and favorite coffee shop is quintessentially Facebook, a company that’s always talking about people, whether it’s the launch of Facebook Home and a phone organized by “people instead of apps,” or the re-launch of News Feed with the emphasis on large photos of people.

And by being able to tag businesses, like your favorite coffee shop, in addition to your friends, the update points a clear path to Instagram setting up for advertising, which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted at on Wednesday’s earnings call.

“I’m really proud of how Instagram is going,” Zuckerberg said on the call Wednesday. “Kevin and his team made incredible progress since last april, and the Instagram community is growing even faster than the Facebook community did when it was this size.”

Zuckerberg said advertising on Instagram is “something we’re thinking about,” which wouldn’t be surprising as Instagram moves into its second year under Facebook’s ownership, a deal that was announced in April 2012, but hadn’t produced many changes to Instagram at first. However, tagging people and having a page aggregating photos of you are both very Facebook-like features, and being able to tag brands would set the company up to create brand-specific Instagram accounts and features like Facebook Pages.

For users, it’s important to note that the “Photos of You” will become visible to your followers on May 16, so you can play around with the feature until then and approve photos before they go live to others.

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Austin is the second city to be getting the one gigabit service, and customers will soon (by soon, we mean middle of 2014) be able to live online at gigabit speeds. Hell, those who don’t want to pay get can 5 Mbps connections for free. Browsing one hundred times faster will cost money, but trust us, we love our 200 Mbps connection and we can tell you it is worth it.

Wondering what exactly Google Fiber can do for a city like Austin? There’s a few different views on Quora based on experiences from Kansas City residents, who just started getting the same service this past November. Of course, given that Austin is home to the South by Southwest festival, it’s likely that bigger technological strides will be made. We wouldn’t be afraid to bet on Austin blossoming into the next Silicon Valley: You heard it here first.

Tumblr edits its Edit team:  It made perfect sense to us when Tumblr set up an editorial team and decided to promote writing on its platform. However, Tumblr turned the lights out on its editorial department this week after less than a year of operation. Called Storyboard, the content curating “experiment” launched in 2012 with the goal of editorializing great stories from Tumblr’s “living, breathing community.” We were moved and entertained by many of these stories — from surviving sexual assault to an exposé on Cumberbitches — but Storyboard, when you really nail it down, was an avenue to repackage, repurpose, and highlight the talent that thrives on its own platform.

David Karp, Founder and CEO, Tumblr (c) 2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

Apparently the world didn’t much care about this approach. From the get-go, Storyboards’ waters were tainted by the ever-so-slight flavor of self promotion — in December, New York Capital’s Joe Pompeo wrote a great piece that explored whether Storyboard was journalism or next-gen marketing — and maybe that’s why Storyboard didn’t (or couldn’t) survive. Tumblr is already struggling to make money, and it seems the only way Storyboard could contribute to the company’s bottom line was by advertorial-izing content from higher-level partners like Time, Bon Appetit, or New York Magazine, which would further blur the lines between journalism and marketing.

Two Thumbs Way Up, Roger Ebert. RIP: There aren’t many and there aren’t likely to be many like Roger Ebert, who inspired, informed and entertained his readers across generations and mediums. He was the first true 21st century journalist. He loved the papers, the magazines, the television, the internet and Twitter. He was the ultimate early adopter and then adapted to medium.

The iconic film critic Roger Ebert passed away this week after a box office-busting 46-year-long career in Hollywood, and while he may have lost the ability to speak in 2006, our own Mathew Ingram shares how Twitter allowed him to share his thoughts, ideas, and opinions with a captivated audience.

A Knowledge Economy shouldn’t ignore the invisibles: Or at least that is what we think. So when Mark Zuckerberg and a handful of other tech luminairies launched FWD.us, a public interest group aiming to make change in the areas of education and immigration, we weren’t afraid to speak up about the bigger change that awaits our society.

While the group may be noble in its causes, FWD.us is not without its problems, especially when it comes to the hot-button topic of immigration. Seems to us that Zuckerberg and Co. aren’t seeing the big picture — or the rest of the world — outside their Silicon Valley bubble. Yes, engineers of technology are important, but if you forget to include the rest of the population in your immigration discussion, then the effort is self-serving and not all that social.

And now for some great stories we read this week that are worth reading:

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FWD.us is an organization started by key leaders in the tech community to promote policies to keep the United States and its citizens competitive in a global economy—including comprehensive immigration reform and education reform.

I admire that Zuckerberg and his merry band of do-gooders for embarking on this quest. I also respect the idea of education reform and applaud the leadership position this group is taking here. And I also applaud the efforts the group will devote to science and innovation.

However, what I hate is the focus put on a specific immigration issue; but I am getting ahead of myself. This is from an op-ed currently on the FWD.us website:

The economy of the last century was primarily based on natural resources, industrial machines and manual labor. It was an economy where many of these resources were zero sum and controlled by companies. If someone else had an oil field, then you did not. There are only so many oil fields, and there is only so much wealth that can be created from them for society. Today’s economy is very different. It is primarily based on knowledge and ideas — resources that are renewable and available to everyone.

Yup, ideas and knowledge are renewable and available. But do they lay the bricks for the data centers that house Facebook’s servers? Do “ideas” — as Zuckerberg & Co describe — actually build the dams that in turn produce the electricity that helps you poke Mark? The food on your plate, it too is just bits and bytes?

Yup, those things don’t need people. They crop up magically. No natural resources, no machines, no manual labor, just …. ideas and knowledge!

What that snippet from FWD.us tells me that when it comes to our Silicon Valley leadership, there is a disconnect in understanding the real world that exists beyond the browser or the mobile phone. We don’t do empathy and human interactions very well in the Valley, especially companies whose raison d’être is social and people. You know, like Facebook.

The problem with this effort is that many of those leaders live in a bubble that is of their own making and have little interaction with the real world. The fact is that any immigration reform needs to dovetail with the domestic reality of the 21st century America. In order to change the world and wanting new policies, there needs to be a deeper understanding of the world around us.

The Flyover Nation

Between Sand Hill Road and Wall Street lies a big country that is going to bear the brunt of the coming connected age. Sorry Mark, but in the age of data, Facebook is Standard Oil and you are Rockefeller. And unfortunately, you have the data and we don’t. If we did, there would be naked transparency on data and privacy from Facebook. But I am digressing again.

Any immigration debate has to start with the education and re-education of the American workforce. With the coming connected age and continued proliferation of technology into our physical world, we are beginning to see disruption and massive displacement on a large scale. We don’t have the mechanisms in place to train people for this quantified society, where data looks to become the ultimate arbiter. How can we have any talk of immigration and a knowledge economy that doesn’t acknowledge that there is a silent desperation outside of Silicon Valley and New York and Washington, D.C.?

People talk about robot-helpers and an army of drones, but I don’t hear how the factory workers and farmers will actually learn how to use them, as well as tame the data these gizmos will throw up and then will put it to work. What is going to happen to millions of people who will be replaced by those drones and robots? After all, they are as much a part of the capitalist food chain that makes the world go around. Damn … if we are going to continue to be an innovation economy, then it has to be about more than a couple of million people.

The Invisibles

Now let’s talk about immigration issues, because when I see FWD.us and the focus of its charter, I see the same old self-serving argument the technology industry serves up when it comes to immigration reform. In my years of writing about technology, I have seen pretty much the same argument made every single time — just change the billionaire or the company clamoring for this change.

Every discussion is about getting startup visas, or visas for engineers and knowledge workers and experts and how we need to get these people to stay in the U.S. after they are done with college. Let’s not trivialize the challenges facing our society and the reality of immigration and job creation in today’s world.

As an immigrant, I see any such discussion as limited. We can’t have a discussion about immigration reform unless we talk about other immigrants — the invisibles who do a lot of the work in the offices of Facebook and Yahoo, but never get invited to the IPO party or are handed an iPhone. How can we have a lobby group which has no representation from those people? Instead we have this:

Across America, creative, hardworking people in coffee shops, dorm rooms and garages are creating the next era of growth. Let’s embrace our future as a knowledge economy and help them — and all of us — reach our full potential.

If Mark and others really cared deeply about immigration reform on a holistic level then the conversation would involve a whole lot of other people — members of non-engineering and non-technology corps. So, no, I don’t buy that just because an immigrant works on an algorithm make her more important.

I know, because I am one. Perhaps FWD.us and Zuckerberg should start actually learning about the whole and real problem: a society disrupted in connected age.

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But for Instagram and its users themselves? Things haven’t actually changed all that much — so far.

One year ago on April 9, 2012, Mark Zuckerberg announced on his Facebook wall (where else?) that the not-yet-public Facebook would acquire Instagram. Founded in 2010 as a pivot from a location-based app called Burbn, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger’s Instagram turned into a scrappy mobile startup that seemed like the antithesis of Facebook’s ubiquitous web platform. It seemed like an odd match, and the even if the sale was a defensive move to keep Instagram out of Twitter’s hands, Zuckerberg explained why the duo still made sense:

“This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.”

The fears that came with the purchase

I wasn’t yet a tech reporter when I heard about the Facebook acquisition, but I remember having an instant sense of fear when I heard the news. Instagram was one of the first apps I eagerly downloaded when I got my first smartphone in August 2011. In the 20 months since then, I’ve shared more than 700 photos on the service, or on average, more than a photo a day. When I heard the news, my immediate worry was that Facebook would kill the app I’d grown to love, a tool that I have used to document my favorite memories over the past year.

And needless to say, I wasn’t alone in this fear. A quick Google search for “Will Facebook ruin Instagram” brings up at least five articles by that title on the first page of results. To say that people were aprehensive is putting it mildly.

What’s stayed the same

But now a year after the deal was announced, the essential core of Instagram — being able to quickly take and share mobile photos that look good, upload instantly, and generate positive social feedback from friends — hasn’t really changed. Sure, there have been signs that Instagram is under new ownership, such as the terms of service debacle in December. But the threats of quitting Instagram seemed overblown, and for now, my feelings about the app I first downloaded remain the same. Instagram still feels like a fast, efficient, and creative world within the app.

Mobilize 2012: Om Malik – Founder and Senior Writer, GigaOM Mike Krieger – Co-Founder, Instagram

Before the Facebook acquisition, Systrom said the company was aiming to hit 100 million users, and the app went ahead and met that benchmark in February of this year. The acquisition didn’t slow user growth, but it didn’t triple the predictions either — presumably once you start reaching large enough numbers, it’s hard to keep growing at earlier paces. But the app continued to do well, likely strongly influenced by the jump to Android just days before the acquisition that turbocharged usage and the increased support from Facebook’s servers to handle increased capacity.

So far, we haven’t seen a designated Instagram tab appear on Facebook profiles. And aside from larger photos on the revamped timeline (for all photos, not just those from Instagram), and integrated likes on photos, there hasn’t been much in the way of preferential treatment for the photo app, as Zuckerberg noted in March. Of course this could, and probably will, change over time. But for now, we haven’t seen anything too radical.

What’s changed

However, we have seen some changes to the platform over the past year. They might not be ones that casual users would notice, or changes that alter the core experience of Instagram. But they do hint where the company could be headed, and how the two companies are interacting so far:

1. It set off the battles among the web giants. Over the past year we’ve seen the launch of apps and products like Twitter’s photo filters, Twitter’s video service Vine, Flickr’s re-launched mobile app, and the rise of Snapchat. The Instagram acquisition came as Facebook realized it didn’t have a lock on how people shared photos, or as Om wrote, “Facebook was scared shitless and knew that for first time in its life it arguably had a competitor that could not only eat its lunch, but also destroy its future prospects.” But the acquisition didn’t slow down Facebook’s competitors, and suddenly Instagram was pulled into the ongoing struggles between Twitter and Tumblr and Apple and Facebook. Instagram had previously been friendly in allowing users to cross-post content to a variety of sites like Tumblr and Twitter, and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was an early investor in Instagram. But with reports that Twitter failed at acquiring Instagram just before Zuckerberg succeeded, relations between the companies deteriorated later in the year.
2. Instagram has to play by Facebook’s rules now. Until December, we hadn’t seen many consequences from Instagram’s new owners, but when Instagram updated its terms of service and people thought their Instagram photos of their kids could end up on billboards, they freaked out. Intentionally or not, Instagram had gone down Facebook’s “do it now, ask permission later” path, and as it has with Facebook, it got Instagram in trouble. While it seems people’s proclamations of swearing off Instagram didn’t really last, it served to remind causal users of the app that the acquisition had really taken place.
3. Say hello to the web. Prior to the deal, Instagram’s founders had said repeatedly that they had no interest in moving Instagram to the desktop, but the company did launch desktop profiles in November and photo-viewing and feeds in February. It’s hard to tell if those additions have changed the service much, but as we wrote before it’s the ability to upload photos via desktop that would change the alter the experience more dramatically — that so far, the founders have said they’re not interested in adding.

Looking forward to the next year of Facebook + Instagram

So what will happen to Instagram over the upcoming year? Facebook has been through some serious changes since the acquisition – there was the botched IPO, the dramatic improvement of the speed and user experience on mobile, the launch of e-commerce products with the Karma acquisition and Gifts, the launch of Graph Search, the revamp of Newsfeed and tweaks to Timeline, and a new Home on Android.

Post-IPO, the company is building up its service as an advertising network, and doubling down on ways to make money. It seems like Instagram could be the next target for that. Emily White, Sheryl Sandberg’s protege at both Google and then Facebook where she worked on AdWords and then Facebook’s mobile partnerships, just announced last week that she’s joining Instagram’s team to be director of operations for the group. White’s joining Instagram could do for the group what Sandberg’s arrival did for Facebook: hello, monetization and advertising. We’ve already seen celebrities using their large followings on Instagram for brand endorsements.

But if users flipped out over terms of service (that a lot of people don’t even read anyway), it’s easy to imagine the outrage that would come if and when mobile ads started appearing in the Instagram feed. That could be the tipping point for many users who haven’t seen big changes over the past year. But it also could be the way for Facebook to start making up the billion dollars it spent on those photos of yours.

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Facebook’s Android announcements on Thursday, which essentially create Facebook-centric launchers for Android phones, further underscored that the future of the company is mobile. ”Facebook Home” makes some nice UI improvements around messaging, but considering the long-time buzz surrounding the potential for a “Facebook phone,” this particular announcement did not seem revolutionary.

The biggest message from Facebook on Thursday in Menlo Park was was that the company wants to improve our ability to communicate with loved ones on mobile. That’s not exactly a new theme. Facebook’s Home basically presents a package of the company’s apps that users can download from the Google Play store that creates a dominant Facebook home screen of photos and an integrated launcher for apps and notifications on Android. The company also announced an HTC First phone with a deeply-integrated version of Facebook Home pre-installed.

Mobile is where most of the world is headed, as we spend increasing amounts of time staring at our phones and tablets. A company like Facebook, as hungry for user data as any other online advertising business, likes a product like Home because it gives the company greater data about its users. Also, Wall Street has pretty much mandated that Facebook has to make more money through mobile advertising. While ads won’t roll out immediately to the rotating photos on the cover screen, the company didn’t rule it out, meaning it’s probably coming.

But as Om so aptly noted earlier today, people already spend a good deal of time on Facebook on mobile — about 30 minutes per day. But the only people who will use Facebook Home are those who choose it, either by purchasing the HTC First phone through AT&T, or downloading Facebook Home through the Google Play store. It’s not a product that everyone will immediately have to or choose to use, the way the revamped News Feed will shortly roll out to everyone. And it’s certainly not something Apple iPhone users will likely see any time soon.

My favorite aspect of the new features through Android revolved around messaging. Messaging and chat apps on mobile are huge, especially for users in Asia, and Facebook needed to make improvements there to push back the third-party apps encroaching on that space. There’s already a good deal banter on the internet making fun of the “Chat Heads,” which are bubble photos of your friends that live on the screen and show you activity and messages from each person. But as a frequent texter who carries on a variety of iMessage threads at any one time, I might appreciate the ability to conduct chats on top of other apps so you don’t have to stop what you’re doing.

Mark Zuckerberg checks out one of the new phones with the Facebook Home at Menlo Park headquarters.

Facebook’s business both as a social network and an advertising network completely revolve around sharing, as Zuckerberg said Thursday when he emphasized the importance of a social, connected world. If users stop sharing data with Facebook it will have a problem, so it’s worth asking how Home might encourage people to share more. The revolving cover photos on the homescreen certainly bring photos to the forefront and encourage likes and commenting, which you can do from that screen, and Home’s emphasis on messaging could increase how often people use Facebook Messenger if it’s featured more prominently.

Zuckerberg noted that people check their phone’s lock screens hundreds of times a day, but might only check the Facebook app 12 or 15 times, and Home aims to change that. So Home, if you choose to use it, would have you checking Facebook more often and consuming more visual content. But will it have you sharing substantially more? That doesn’t seem like a given.

Fundamentally, keeping users inside Facebook is great for Facebook (and when the company eventually rolls out ads to the cover screen photos, it could be quite lucrative.) But for Android users who already have the Facebook app and can customize their launchers? There doesn’t seem to be a lot about this announcement that changes that experience.

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Zuckerberg did that for two reasons: First, to buy his company time to build a proper OS that will come to us in dribs and drabs and then will wash over us suddenly, like a riptide. And secondly, to convince people that ”Home” is just like any other app. Unfortunately, Facebook’s Home is not as benign as that.

In fact, Facebook Home should put privacy advocates on alert, for this application erodes any idea of privacy. If you install this, then it is very likely that Facebook is going to be able to track your every move, and every little action. It is a future I wrote about a few days ago, and let me explain using that very same context.

The new Home app/UX/quasi-OS is deeply integrated into the Android environment. It takes an effort to shut it down,  because Home’s whole premise is to be always on and be the dashboard to your social world. It wants to be the start button for apps that are on your Android device, which in turn will give Facebook a deep insight on what is popular. And of course, it can build an app that mimics the functionality of that popular, fast-growing mobile app. I have seen it done before, both on other platforms and on Facebook.

But there is a bigger worry. The phone’s GPS can send constant information back to the Facebook servers, telling it your whereabouts at any time.

So if your phone doesn’t move from a single location between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. for say a week or so, Facebook can quickly deduce the location of your home. Facebook will be able to pinpoint on a map where your home is, whether you share your personal address with the site or not. It can start to build a bigger and better profile of you on its servers. It can start to correlate all of your relationships, all of the places you shop, all of the restaurants you dine in and other such data. The data from accelerometer inside your phone could tell it if you are walking, running or driving. As Zuckerberg said — unlike the iPhone and iOS, Android allows Facebook to do whatever it wants on the platform, and that means accessing the hardware as well.

This future is going to happen – and it is too late to debate. However, the problem is that Facebook is going to use all this data — not to improve our lives — but to target better marketing and advertising messages at us. Zuckerberg made no bones about the fact that Facebook will be pushing ads on Home.

And most importantly it is Facebook, a company that is known to have played loose-and-easy with consumer privacy and data since its very inception, asking for forgiveness whenever we caught them with its hand in the cookie jar. I don’t think we can be that forgiving or reactive with Facebook on mobile.

It is time to ask for simple, granular and easy to understand privacy and data collection policies from Facebook, especially for mobile. We need to ask our legislative representatives to understand that Facebook wants to go from our desktops and browsers right into our home — the place where we need to be private.

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Facebook’s news feed design was the big news of the week. Here is what we think about the new colorful icons and sorting of the feed into categories like events and music. By the way, why couldn’t they couldn’t come up with a better analogy than a newspaper?

Talking about Facebook, one has to wonder what raw nerve Nick Bilton’s piece hit that the social web giant had to come back with all its PR guns blazing. Bilton pointed out that the engagement on his posts had gone down drastically but when he paid to promote those same links, it shot up. We have a sneaking suspicion that we have not heard the last of this debate, but if you want to get a good handle on the situation, try reading this analysis by Nick O’Neill.

Mark Zuckerberg responds to press questions and photos after announcing the new Facebook News Feed redesign on March 7 in Menlo Park.

Billionaire Boys Club: Facebook and Google have one thing in common: the co-founders of both companies are among the richest people in the world. Not much of a surprise. As technology becomes a part of our everyday lives, it’s also no surprise that tech leaders dominated the top of the annual Forbes Billionaires list this year.

Though they were dubbed “underperformers” by Forbes (technology-based billionaires on the list saw their net worth rise by only 8%, while the entire list combined rose 15%), it’s hard to find fault in a collective fortune of $272.6 billion. But in a time of massive income inequality – 80% of Americans believe their children will be worse off than they are — are these lists still relevant?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google were ranked at number four and five, respectively, while Mark Zuckerberg dropped to the ninth top earner (from sixth in 2012) with $13.3 billion in his coffers. That’s a lot of 747s and James Perse hoodies.

Fortune doesn’t favor the print: Print may be on the decline, but will it die a slow death? Time Warner decided to spin off its magazine publishing arm this week instead of trying to pass off the job to Meredith Corporation, creating a new standalone company for its top mags. This further perpetuates the belief that the broken print model will be ushered into the retirement home sooner rather than later as the web produces endless amounts of content, and technology makes consuming it easier than ever.

But print does have its fans — Warren Buffett invested $344 million in newspapers last year. Does he know something we don’t? We are worried about Fortune, the magazine, for we do think they have some great pieces.

VC vs VC: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venerable venture capital firm that had funded companies such as Sun Microsystems, Netscape, Genentech, Compaq, Amazon and Google, had a pretty forgettable decade. They apologized to their backers. VC Georges van Hoegaerden, writing for industry publication PE Hub, argues that the issues plaguing them and many haloed investing names are much deeper. Our colleague Katie Fehrenbacher writes a thoughtful piece on perils of righteous investing. By the way, have you read that piece about Ellen Pao and her hubby in Vanity Fair?

Mobile-palooza: You have to be really brave to pack your bags and go to Barcelona and attend Mobile World Congress. Our team members David Meyer and Kevin Fitchard did just that and both fell sick after getting back. Chetan Sharma was lucky, and that gave him a chance to recap the mobilepalooza — it is worth reading.

Freedom to Roam: If you’re dreading spending the rest of your mobile life (or at least the next 24 months) tied to one carrier, there’s good news: The White House has your back when it comes to unlocking your phone. A petition that raised over 100,000 signatures in a month has the support of the White House and a number of state senators, one of which has already drafted the Wireless Device Independence Act of 2013, which promises to legally free your devices from carrier restriction. But will it really change anything? Andrew Couts unlocks the truth.

Taking a Bow: Pop music is filled with flash-in-the-pan tunes, but the classics never fade. Unless you’re the CEO of Pandora, Joe Kennedy, who announced this week that he needed a “recharge” after his long 10-year tenure, and will be stepping aside as soon as a replacement can be found. Does this open the door for other up-and-coming music services to make their move?

As it so happens, Apple is said to be seeking a harmonious collaboration with the “Daisy Project,” backed by Beats Electronics, while  Google has partnered with Warner Music for a Google Play subscription service and is setting the stage a YouTube-Spotify throwdown. It will be interesting to see how these companies build and structure their streaming services, especially since this will be yet another effort by Apple to get music right after Ping failed to take off.

Mapping Your Innards: Google has enabled us to visit distant locations, thanks to Street View, and gets us from A to B without much difficulty. But a team of researchers has been able to one-up those achievements by successfully mapping the human metabolism. Why should you care? Well, in the future, we might actually be able to predict how our fragile bodies will react to disease, drugs and foods, which can help make the painful experience of allergy testing and trial-by-elimination a thing of the past.

Here are some stories we recommend for this weekend.

• Let’s save great ideas from the ideas industry, argues Umair Haque, over on Harvard Business Review website. His column is an argument against conferences such as the recently concluded TED.
• The printed travel guidebook is dead. Put a fork in it, says Skift’s Jason Clampet.
• The WatchMen: There’s a high tech team inside the Milwaukee PD trained to monitor the city and fight crime before it happens. This is their story.
• A LEED-certified city built on algorithms? It’s happening in South Korea, and it might give us a little glimpse of what future cities can (should?) look like.
• If you think Google Glass is futuristic, check out the computerized eyewear Steve Mann has been working on for the past decade.
• Upgrade or die, says George Packer in the New Yorker. He argues “that obsessive upgrading and chronic stagnation are intimately related, in the same way that erotic fantasies are related to sexual repression.”
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Then a friend emailed and said that I was being too harsh because they are, after all, catering to a billion people, are a publicly traded company and are under attack from all sides by more nimble, smarter startups that are taking attention away from them. Fair enough: I decided that I would give them a fair shake whenever I got access to the redesigned news feed.

Given the planet-long wait list, I didn’t sign up and didn’t email Facebook PR. But sometime last night, the new feed update showed up. I have had a few hours to play around with it, and here are my impressions and thoughts on the business implications of the redesign. So here we go:

Four things I like:

• Overall design: Facebook has been stockpiling design talent like the U.S. used to stockpile nuclear weapons. And the result of all that design IQ is finally bearing fruit. The new news feed is actually what Facebook says it is — clean, simple and beautiful. The white space (or gray space) is put to effective use. You can see the iOS and Apple influence on the redesign in small smallest of the elements such as menu items, icons and message status buttons. They also get full marks for creating a unified experience (including the left hand navigation menu — which includes links to apps, messenger, events and what not) that spans elegantly across devices. They get a A- on this (for reasons stated below.)
• Responsive Design: In my test, it worked well on iPad, iPad Mini, desktop, Nexus 7, Nexus 4 and iPhone5. It is very consistent and I wouldn’t change a thing. An A+ on this.
• Photos: Mark Zuckerberg and his coterie might like to think of themselves as rivals to Twitter (not) or a newspaper, but in the end, Facebook is and will always be a giant photo service. And to that end, increasing the size of the photos and being able to create photos collages (collections, as Evan Williams would say) is a great move and actually makes scrolling through photos easier, faster and more enjoyable. I do believe that with this redesign, Facebook has give its core functionality a nice boost. I would give this an A+, though Facebook should consider giving us the ability to make it our default feed.
• Music: Remember that Facebook Music service we talked about back in June 2011? Two years later, the new “music” feed that is showing up a sub-category of their feed is reminiscent of that design. It also aggregates music events in my calendar and also shows me the bands liked by my friends. I like the suggestions that are offered to me but I am still not sure what to do with that information. Why? Because when someone recommends me a or an artist, I want to be able to listen to the song (or the artist’s work) and if I like it, I add to a playlist for future consumption. That flow is still not there. All in all, decent offering which gets a solid B+ from me, because I am still not sure why I care if Kevin Tofel likes Dido.

Two things I don’t:

• Facebook did a nice facelift of the news feed, but rest of the service looks a little out of touch. The Messaging app looks old school and could actually use a quick dusting.
• The Search bar on the top is actually quite worthless and comes in the way of what could be a pretty seamless experience. It is a case of when a hasty business decision gets layered on top of good design decisions — the end result is like a great pair of leather shoes with a plastic sole.

And four burning questions:

• I have spent a lot of time with the redesign and I am not clear how this solves Facebook’s two major challenges: retention and engagement. Yes, it is lovely, and the notifications are sort of nicer, but it still does nothing to make me come back more often and actually if anything I will spend less time. I can skim photos and bounce much faster.
• The younger demographic, who is leaving the service (though they are still part of the zombie mob), are not going to come back because of the changes.
• The actual news feed, despite the attractive photos and bigger visuals, is still messy and much less useful that it used to be.
• The biggest question that arises from this cosmetic facelift: what happened to Facebook’s ability to actually learn, adapt and become more human with the feed? In other words, has their ability to sift and make sense of data hit a glass ceiling? My guess is yes.

What it means from a business/money perspective

• Facebook is and will always be news feed centric. And it is one of the main reasons why its early attempts at search and other experiments have not really succeeded. The news feed has to become more context oriented and if they screw up the news feed, they start to lose overall value. So, that is why this aesthetic facelift is much needed.
• Just like I said earlier, Facebook will struggle beyond the news feed and that is why they need to make the feed the focus of all monetization efforts including a more traditional form of advertising. Bigger photos will condition people to bigger ads — something marketers want and like. So expect to see a lot more ads in your feed. I suspect, as the desire to reinvent advertising takes a backseat to realities of the public market.
• Here is the problem with the scenario. So far, you and I don’t much care about the ads that appear on the right hand column. I don’t much care if Zoosk or some crappy ad shows up — I have programmed my brain to ignore it. Others feel that way — though many people are still spending money on those right-column ads.
• Because despite all their posturing, Facebook is terrible at providing context and surfacing ads that make sense. But if they start surfacing similar pointless and terrible ads in the main feed (like all those stupid paid-shares by my friends) then this grand experiment to make more money is going to backfire.

To sum it up

This was a great job to clean up the news feed, make it easier for folks to consume Facebook on all sorts of devices and find ways for easy consumption and create advertising opportunities that are easier advertising agencies and their traditional skills to manage. It is also a tactical admission (though a silent one) about their limitations in providing context and creating a new advertising model.

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It was a good reminder. Back in 2007, the News Feed was a lot boxier. It had a lot fewer photos. There was more text, and everything seemed smaller.

In those early days, Facebook pioneered a different look that distinguished it from competitors like MySpace, offering a cleaner design and fewer options and customization for users. It was a new approach, and it worked. But the amount of content shared to the site has grown by an astounding amount since those days, as you’d expect from a site with now over a billion active users, and the News Feed hadn’t exactly kept pace. It had started to look cluttered and dated, and navigation (not to mention surfacing interesting content) was a challenge.

Mark Zuckerberg takes questions after announcing the updated News Feed in the company’s Menlo Park headquarters on March 7.

So from a visual perspective, Thursday’s update clears out most of the clutter from the homepage, taking Facebook back to its original design proposition of simplicity and filtering. And it emphasizes the idea of Facebook as the “local newspaper,” bringing you a small slice of the most interesting and informative posts on the homepage — and giving you sections where can dive deeper into the material where you want.

I wrote on Wednesday about the three advantages Facebook still has that I didn’t think it should break with the new design: content discovery (showing you interesting things you hadn’t previously discovered), visual media (photos and videos still look the best on Facebook’s page), and the content directory (taking advantage of all your friends and their information on the site.) In many ways, the re-design announced Thursday played perfectly into these three strengths, primarily the first two.

“We believe that the best personalized newspaper should have a wide variety of content,” Zuckerberg explained during the hour-long presentation.

With content discovery, the new News Feed — structured after the metaphorical newspaper — is all about giving you more content to read and discover (in fact, it seems more like a consumption page now than one for sharing — interesting to consider that users are probably sharing more from mobile devices than desktops now). The re-design introduces tabs on the top right of the page that let you toggle your view: “All Friends” (who you haven’t hidden from the newsfeed), “Close Friends” (an older feature where you can designate certain people), “Following” (pages and people you subscribe to), “Groups,” “Photos,” “Games,” “Music,” and “Other.”

In each of these categories, users will be able to select specific set of content to dive into. “All Friends” gives users a chronological series of updates from friends, providing a feature that Facebook employees said was highly requested from users (especially considering the criticism the News Feed algorithms and perceived lack of transparency have faced in the past.)

The “Following” page serves as almost like a page for news, assuming you like any celebrities, journalists, news outlets, or organizations on the site who post updates. The New York Times’ Nick Bilton recently criticized the company for not sharing his posts with subscribers as much as he would expect, and while the company refuted his claims, the Following page certainly addresses this need for asynchronous relationships and sharing.

And the company emphasized music — the music page will show songs your friends are listening to through apps like Spotify that use the company’s Open Graph. Each of these tabs give you a new set of information to dig into and greater control over the information you see.

From a design perspective, the emphasis on photos is a huge part of what’s new. Photos are far more dominant in the main news feed, appearing larger in previews and playing on two obvious influences: the Instagram experience of a continuous photo scroll, and design for mobile that inherently incorporates a simpler, stripped-down look.

While it’s still slightly unclear how advertising will play into the changes, since the company gave virtually no attention to ads on Thursday, it seems obvious, as The Atlantic pointed out, that the larger visuals the company debuted will play perfect with ads when they get the same treatment as user photos. Zuckerberg said on the last earnings call it’s something the company should provide. Mike Isaac for AllThingsD pointed out that for Facebook, it’s all about giving people compelling visuals, and surely that will go for ads as well.

Michael Reckhow, a product manager for mobile newsfeed, said they had worked so hard to build a cleaner mobile feed, that in looking at the desktop, they realized they’d already devised many of the solutions they needed:

“Mobile is inherently simpler,” he said. So it’s fair to say that in some ways, you’ve already seen the new Facebook — on your phone.

For Facebook, the question is how users will respond to the updated look. Hopefully for the company, adoption of the new features will go the opposite way of print newspaper subscriptions.

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