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Facebook is redesigning their home page, at long last.  Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, announced a teaser to the changes on the Facebook Blog last night in celebration of the social media site’s 6th anniversary and 400 millionth user.  Later, on the same blog, Jing Chen introduced the new updates.

Some of the new improvements include putting more core features right on the front page in easily-accessible menu options.  The features are rolling out slowly, with about 100 million users having it as of this writing and the other 300 million expected to have them before the weekend is through.

The biggest change are the new icons at the top of the user’s home page.  These will include quick links to things most-often used by those logging in: requests, messages, and notifications.  The icons turn red when something new is in the section they represent, giving a fast visual cue to the latest updates to your Facebook activity.

On the left is another newly enhanced menu, this one giving links directly to your feeds, messages, friends, photos, and so forth, as before.  Now, however, when you click one of those links, such as your photos, the window that opens has links to your own photo albums as well as those of your friends, giving you the chance to browse easily and even see the latest updates to those photos immediately.  Similar enhancements were made to friends lists and feeds.

Finally, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington this morning broke the news that Facebook is also working on a complete rewrite of their messaging system to build it into a full-featured webmail/email product.  This is known as Project Titan and will likely be one of the biggest changes to the Facebook product in a long time.

The rumors with Titan are that it will be a full-featured webmail product much like Google’s Gmail, with POP/IMAP support, vanity URL emails, and more.  Can’t wait.

So a lot of big stuff is happening at the Web’s largest social media giant.

When most people think of the National Football League’s Super Bowl, they think of two things: parties with friends watching the greatest football game of the year and the worlds most expensive commercials. Amazingly, this game that seems to be all about basic strategy and brute physical force is actually full of cutting-edge technology.

The 2007 Super Bowl in Miami was broadcast by CBS and involved hundreds of crew members manning Hi-Def cameras, long-reach microphones, expert computer technology to handle the play-by-play, hugely muscular data servers to provide up-to-the-second information and overlays, and more. All of that (and more) is converging in South Florida again and this time, Fox will be broadcasting the event and the tech will be even more dazzling.

The Super Bowl brings with it a lot of things: sex, excitement, and a general boost to local businesses. It also brings a lot of gadgetry. The little yellow line they overlay on the screen to determine whether it’s a first and ten or not? That requires a lot more computing muscle than most might think. The drawing of that one line requires computer models of the entire stadium, the field, computation of the angle of the camera and its orientation on the field itself, and a lot of number-crunching within a few milliseconds.

Lasers are used to map out the individual yard lines on the field before the game; cameras are positioned with perfect accuracy and range-finding equipment is used to calculate their zoom potential. All of that for one little yellow line on the screen. Now consider the huge databases of information that produce near-instant on-screen results for announcers or live broadcast feeds. Then there’s communication between Fox’s camera and production crews, the announcers, and more. That’s just the television side of things. The teams themselves have complex communications systems that go beyond the old “slap your wrist twice, tweak your nose, and nod your head three times” signals that used to be the game’s mainstay. In fact, even Madden’s old chalkboard X and O drawings are mostly gone too. Now, it’s scrambled and encrypted headset walkie-talkies, smart phones and PDAs on the field, and instant updates for fans on Twitter.

Not to mention the NFL’s official Super Bowl blog. Then there’s us fans. Local tech companies and freelancers, like Andre Rumyantsev, have been hired and are working feverishly to provide expanded content and technology solutions for the big game. “We are working to make sure the WiFi and cellular repeaters are in place and ready to go so that reporters, fans, and maybe even team members can access the Internet and do their thing real time,” he says. “It’s a real boost for us in some tough economic times, but Florida is all about IT and football!” Cell phone companies, including all the major players like Verizon and AT&T, are expecting activity in the Miami area to increase three or four times normal and have increased capacity with mobile towers and other technology to keep up.

Overall, the Super Bowl is about more than just a leather ball and big guys in uniforms. There is a lot of technology behind a game that appears, on its surface, to be such a simple match of brute force.

When Amazon announced their fourth quarter sales and financials, they showed a marked improvement going up 42% to $9.5 billion for the end of the year.  Buried in those results was another startling set of numbers: the Kindle sold exceptionally well during the Holiday season and for every 10 physical books sold, Amazon sells 6 digital ones.

The real shocker with the Kindle numbers blew most analysts out of the water.  According to TechCrunch, analysts expected the company to sell around 2.5 million by the end of 2010, but Amazon has apparently beaten that number by hitting the three million mark before the end of 2009!

That’s amazing and is followed by another bit of news, just released from Amazon this morning: the Kindle Reader software is available for free for PC download and will soon be coming to the Mac and possibly even the iPhone.  This is probably to encourage new users who may eventually upgrade to a real Kindle device, which will be facing competition from the new iPad from Apple and is seeing competition now from the Barnes & Noble Nook.

Another innovative device, which will likely be on shelves this year, may put the Kindle, the Nook, and possibly even the iPad out of business is the Pixel Qi.  This innovative device is quietly being put into production by LCD legend Mary Lou Jepsen who is quite literally responsible for the tech that makes netbooks possible–cheap screens.

She did that while engineering $100 laptops for One Laptop Per Child, a non-profit dedicated to bringing computers and Internet access to underpriveledged children world wide.

The reader market is the one to watch for this years’ greatest innovations in gadgetry.  While the iPad is slowing down the Internet with all of its buzz (for what reason, I can’t fathom), it’s not the innovation to keep your eye on, in my estimation.  That belongs to the emergence of the digital book reader, which might soon replace dead tree publication altogether.

Apple finally made the announcement about their new touch screen (“tablet”) computer called the iPad yesterday and today, every tech site on the ‘Net seems immersed in commentary and speculation about how the device will measure up, how much it looks like an oversized iPhone, and who can best guess the “big picture” on the thing.

Let’s look at an iPad reality check instead.

As we reported yesterday, McGraw-Hill’s CEO leaked information about the device that he probably shouldn’t have.  That seems to have angered Steve Jobs, Apple’s big man, because at the product announcement event yesterday, the McGraw-Hill logo was significantly missing from Jobs’ slide presentation.  Uh-oh.

Further, Apple could find themselves in some legal hot water over the iPad’s name, since Fujitsu came out with a product of exactly the same name in 2002, as shown here by the New York Times.  Maybe Apple should consider renaming the device before its release.  Perhaps the Apple iPhoneXL (for Xtra Large)?

A few things that some might find disheartening about the iPad are the lack of a camera, the lack of anything remotely resembling the stylus-style inputs of true “touch screens” (it has a virtual keyboard instead), and that it has no video out (HDMI) for watching video on a real screen.

Other missing components include the ability to play Flash and is missing standard ports for plug-ins–everything needs an adapter.  Also, like the iPhone, the iPad is locked into the 3G network of AT&T and friends.  That’s probably the number one consumer complaint for the iPhone and Apple totally ignores it.  Again.

There are a lot of other things to make this device a no-go for a lot of people.  The inability to run apps other than officially approved iTunes Store offerings and the inability to multi-task are big ones.  These are probably the number one reason the iPad will not be seen as anything but a glorified toy by most of us.  I mean, for $499, we can get a pretty decent and similarly-sized netbook computer that can do everything the iPad can’t.  So why spend the money on the iPad?  Is a touch screen really all that and a bag of chips?

I don’t think so.  Disappointing, for sure.  I’m a big iPhone fan, but for the price, I see no reason to spend money on something that’s much less portable and has few trade-offs to make up for it.

The New York Times’ Brad Stone and Stephanie Clifford talked about how Apple may be giving the print media industry (including, ironically, the NYT itself) a chance to re-invent itself using the new device.  The iPhone is already popular enough to be one of the leading ways that many access their print media, especially news, and the upcoming tablet–expected to be announced tomorrow–is poised to be even more popular.

The problem is that given Apple’s past performance with media, specifically music, the publishers of print media may not like what they’ll have to give up in order to work with Apple.  With iTunes, the music industry had to make deep concessions about their products and bend to the controlling will of Steve Jobs.  Many in the industry continue to be unhappy about their relationship with iTunes and see it as a necessary evil until something better comes along to replace it.

Their relationship with Google and YouTube, however, seems to be quite the opposite.  Print media, already operating on relatively low margins of profit, may find that the concessions required by Jobs and iTunes to “get on board” may be too deep.

In an interview with Andreas Haas, CEO of Axiotron, PC Magazine talked about the former top executive with Apple’s European division about the imminent Apple tablet device and what he thought it would be.  Haas seems to think it will be a more powerful, larger, and more useful iPhone or iPod Touch device with the ability to be a true portable mini-computer beyond what today’s smart phones and PDAs are capable of.  It will not, however, be a true tablet (which he says is designated by being able to write on the screen).

It’s expected that Apple will announce the tablet (or a similar device) tomorrow at a scheduled press conference.  The question is: will the new device be just another iPhone or will it truly be another revolution in portable computing?

It hit the New York Times amidst the buzz about the Times planning to begin charging for content, but that didn’t slow down the speculation around the ‘Net.  Microsoft is, according to the NYT, in talks with cable TV outlets, notably ESPN, to negotiate streaming content onto the Xbox.

The idea is to combine cable television and Xbox Live to make the game box more than just games.  With the Box falling behind other game systems like the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation, Microsoft no doubt hopes to boost market share by creating an all-in-one system with the Xbox to appeal to more than just kids and teenagers, but also parents.

The SeattlePI says that the quiet talks, behind closed doors, were “in-depth” between Microsoft and Disney (who owns ESPN).  They point out that both the Wii and PlayStation have Netflix streaming, making it no longer exclusive to the Xbox.

Of the three consoles, it appears that the Xbox is the one that is really turning into something akin to, well, your computer, really.  Although it still plugs into the TV and uses game paddles instead of a keyboard and mouse, the Xbox is capable of using Twitter, streaming music from Last.fm, and more.  Just like, well, your desktop.

It appears that one of the hottest venues now for traditional game console developers to explore is integrating the console with the Internet.  It’s only a matter of time before the console comes full circle and WebTV is born again, really.  Only this time, I hope, with a better price plan, the ability to actually load websites, and no loooooong waits for the dialup connection to finish downloading…