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In this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss current events--Comcast and BitTorrent teaming up, Oracle's latest earnings, recent moves at Facebook, and Adobe Systems' introduction of Photoshop for the cloud.

For reference, here are links to some of the coverage:

BitTorrent president: Comcast agreement is a 'win'

Comcast and BitTorrent bury the hatchet

Oracle new license revenue triggers IT spending worries

Facebook goes hyper-viral with 'People You May Know'

Facebook ignores OpenSocial, embraces Windows Live Contacts API

Review: Photoshop Express beta

The geeks know Twitter but most folks don't, and that's one reason why Facebook was able to persuade Hong Kong rich guy Li Ka-shing to pay at least $100 million for a piece of the company.

As long as Facebook can make the case that it's the hippest of the new, new things out there in cyberland, fine. And for the time being, it's probably got little to worry about. The OpenSocial Foundation--my colleague Caroline McCarthy calls it "The Justice League of social media"--is still a concept waiting to materialize. There are a … Read more

Hackers have turned their attention to Facebook's hundreds of independent applications. The results are not terribly surprising, but do not tell a good tale: app developers don't seem to know a thing about basic security, and are putting private user information at risk. As a result, malicious hackers are able to access and change what should be private user data managed by the application providers.

Just a few months after this blog brought you exclusive news of privacy problems in Facebook's application system, we are now already seeing the consequences of Facebook's decision to pass the … Read more

Li Ka-shing, the Hong Kong telecom mogul who invested $60 million in Facebook last year, has upped his stake to $100 million and may invest even more, MarketWatch reported Thursday.

Facebook was valued at an eyebrow-raising $15 billion when Microsoft purchased a 5 percent stake at $240 million.

According to MarketWatch, Li made the initial announcement during the earnings call for his company, Hutchison Whampoa. "Facebook is doing very well and we could have some synergy between the 3G services of Hutchison and Facebook, so the customers could use Facebook on mobile phones," Li reportedly said.

Among Li'… Read more

Facebook has about 67 million members. With the new "People You May Know" feature, the number of connections per member will skyrocket, extending the reach and stickiness of Facebook's social graph.

People You May Know finds people within six degrees or so of separation and suggests them as potential friends. It appears that the threshold is set at four, meaning you are connected to four of the same people as the suggested "friend." FriendFeed has taken a somewhat similar approach for recommending new people to "follow."

This type of recommendation engine, which taps … Read more

The trend is clear--the best bait for well-fed Googlers, especially ones who joined after the company's 2004 IPO, is another hot pre-IPO company. And Facebook is that company.

The latest Googler to jump to Facebook is Ethan Beard. Formerly director of social media at the search giant, he will become director of business development at the popular social-networking company. The news was first reported by TechCrunch.

The defection comes shortly after Google sales chief Sheryl Sandberg left to go to Facebook. Others who have blazed the trail include Benjamin Ling of Google Checkout, Justin Rosenstein of GDrive, and Gideon … Read more

Facebook is launching a pretty cool new feature. It's called "People You May Know" and it shows exactly what you would think it does...people who you may know, based on people who you are friends with.

Just by looking at the suggestions that it made, I know or have met pretty much all of the people it is suggesting. LinkedIn has a pretty much identical offering, going by the same name, and it has caught on there. This is a very powerful feature, and I think a lot of people are really going to like this.… Read more

There was a strange moment this afternoon at the Snap Summit 2.0 in San Francisco. Dave Morin, Facebook's Senior Platform Manager was fielding some audience questions after spending the better part of an hour giving a very broad overview of Facebook's development efforts to a room full of mostly developers. For many, the event was the highlight of the day in a conference whose very promotional materials were made to emulate the look of a Facebook profile page.

An audience member in the back called Morin out on preaching openness despite the fact Facebook is one of … Read more

The new location-based service FindMe is a straightforward app that uses cell phone towers to broadcast your general whereabouts to Facebook friends, saving you from updating Facebook manually with places you frequently travel. In beta, FindMe installs on your cell phone and updates your Facebook status when it senses you've changed locations. For each new cell area FindMe detects, you'll be able to tag it "Work," "Home," and so on, and you'll only share addresses you manually enter yourself. As you change zones, FindMe updates your bearings, going "dark" when you … Read more