We don’t know about you, but we’re sort of a fan of being a fan of things on Facebook. It can be useful a way to keep up with what’s going on at the White House, for example. Or you can let the world know that you enjoy “Not Being On Fire“, in case they were wondering. Or, you can express your support for political change. Or can you?

We noticed over the weekend that <a href="one Facebook fan page has said that Facebook is forcing it to shut down to meet the terms of service, but we can’t help but wonder what exactly is going on here.

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The fan page, which goes by the uber-long title of “Revocation of tax-exempt status from churches engaging in political action“, sent out this message over the weekend:

NOTICE: To comply with Facebook Terms of Service, I am forced to delete this fan page because it is not an official organization. I have created a group page for the same purpose as the fan page. Please, join us in our new location. I will be deleting this page in 1 week..

Most often, a Facebook fan page is shut down because it is violating the terms of service by spamming its users. A look at the Revocation page (and having been a fan for some time now) shows no evidence of over-zealous promotion or spamming.

The group has over 120,000 fans and a number of them are crying foul.

“You mean to tell me SHOE LACES is an official organization?” writes one commenter.

Other commenters, it seems, are looking for retaliation at what they see as targeted censorship. One writes writes that they have “Just reported a bunch of Traditional Marriage fan pages [to Facebook] citing the same policy.”

The common thought throughout the threads is that complaints have reached Facebook from those who disagree with the group’s political bent and Facebook has acquiesced to their demands.

According to section 12 of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, “Pages are special profiles that may only be used to promote a business or other commercial, political, or charitable organization or endeavor (including non-profit organizations, political campaigns, bands, and celebrities).” [Emphais added]

This page in Facebook’s Help Center says that, “Only the official representative of an organization, business, celebrity, or band may create a Facebook Page.” But at the same time, could you not become the “official representative” of an “endeavor” at the time of creating that page? The moment you tell other people we should march for a cause, you become the march organizer – the “official representative”.

We do know that in the past, Facebook has stood strong on the side of promoting free speech, so we can only wonder at what is going on behind the scenes here. And while the fan page has organized a separate group, the difference between a group and a fan page on Facebook is not insignificant, as groups have little in the way of engaging their users and reaching out to them. A fan page, on the other hand, can post notices and announcements that will reach the feeds of its users.

We reached out to both the fan page’s creators but have yet to receive any response. Facebook told us that they were going to have to look into it and get back to us later. We would like to think that this is a misunderstanding or the fan page did violate the TOS is some way other than its claimed reason, otherwise, this doesn’t look good. If a competition between a pickle and Nickelback’s fan base is a valid fan page, then one expressing political thought that “endeavors” to create political change should surely stand.

We hope to have more for you as the day goes on.

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Lifehacker’s founding editor Gina Trapani has just announced that she’s joining Expert Labs, the government-oriented independent think tank led by Anil Dash and funded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her first project: deploying her Twitter-based decision making software called ThinkTank for the White House.

The Obama administration announced the joint project with Expert Labs in a blog post earlier this month. As Trapani described it today: “The President has identified a series of scientific and technical challenges that are as important to the future as the moon landing was. And we want to help drive feedback on that list, and even suggest what other items should be on there that haven’t been included.”

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Trapani explained today that the fundamental qualities of ThinkTank are that it leverages existing social connections (today on Twitter, soon on Facebook and later beyond), that it stores the data on your own server just like WordPress does and that it’s open source and community developed. The software sounds like “the WordPress of Twitter data harvesting.”

Trapani has been one of the foremost voices in tracking the ways the web can improve everyday life and work. She focuses on making new developments accessible and is also a respected software developer.

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SlideShare just announced that it now offers businesses the ability to create their own custom channels on the popular document sharing service. These channels allow businesses and enterprises to share their presentations, e-books and whitepapers with a wider audience. Microsoft, Ogilvy, Adobe and Razorfish Marketing are among today’s launch partners. The White House also now uses a SlideShare channel to share over 1,000 documents with the public. In addition, you can also find a our own custom ReadWriteWeb channel here.

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According to SlideShare’s CEO and co-founder Rashmi Sinha, SlideShare current gets over 25 million unique visitors per month.

For now, SlideShare is only offering these new channels to larger businesses. This is clearly part of SlideShare’s monetization strategy and fits in well with SlideShare’s other business-oriented products like AdShare and LeadShare, both of which are part of SlideShare’s strategy to position itself as a site where professionals can share their content and connect with potential customers.

According to Sinha, these custom channels – which include all of the standard social networking features of SlideShare – will allow businesses to create communities around their content and help these companies to engage their customers. Besides sharing slides, these companies will also be able to aggregate content from their blogs or their Twitter feeds on their SlideShare pages.

In addition to offering branded channels with company logos and a custom look and feel, SlideShare now also offers enterprises the ability to sponsor topical channels.

Sadly, though, it doesn’t look like the company plans to give regular users the ability to create and curate their own channels anytime soon. Being able to curate topical channels would be a nice feature, but for now, if you want to do this, you will have to resort to embedding SlideShare files on your own site.

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The concept of cloud computing received a big pat on the back this afternoon.  Vivek Kundra, the CIO of the USA, announced the launch of Apps.gov, a storefront designed to help federal agencies research and buy cloud-based solutions.

Kundra explained in a White House Blog post, "Cloud computing is the next generation of IT in which data and applications will be housed centrally and accessible anywhere and anytime by a various devices (this is opposed to the current model where applications and most data is housed on individual devices).  By consolidating available services, Apps.gov is a one-stop source for cloud services – an innovation that not only can change how IT operates, but also save taxpayer dollars in the process."

What’s interesting (and makes this story more relevant to the search engine industry), though, is that some taxpayer dollars may now make their way to Google.  Google is one of the service providers that were allowed into the Apps.gov store, and in response, it’s taking a couple of steps.

First, Google’s attempting to make sure that Google Apps is authorized to operate under the Federal Information Security Management Act.  Second, the search giant intends to create a dedicated cloud for government customers.  (Matthew Glotzbach, Google’s Enterprise’s director of product management, gave more details on the Google Public Policy Blog if you’re interested.)

Accomplishing these things and securing the U.S. government as a customer would obviously represent a huge victory for Google.

An entry on the White House blog looks at where President Barack Obama’s YouTube videos are getting viewed the most. This of course varies from video to video, but it’s interesting to look at.

The White House references an article from Micah L. Sifry at techPresident, who looks at YouTube Insight data to see what regions some of the President’s speeches were most popular in.

I would imagine that if you run through all of the White House videos, more of them will have the strongest popularity in the United States, but of the ones the White House picks out specifically, only one of them had the US as the location where it was most popular, and that was Obama’s speech to the Muslim World in Cairo.

Here is a look at a couple more:

The President’s Video Message to the Iranian People on the Nowruz Holiday

The President’s Speech in Ghana

This information is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, it illustrates how YouTube users (including businesses) can look at data that YouTube freely provides, and there is plenty more of that if you use the YouTube Insight tool. Secondly, I find it interesting that the government’s use of YouTube is clearly doing wonders for getting content viewed by the online population in appropriate parts of the world. It’s not that the information is unexpected, but it highlights the role online video, social media, and YouTube specifically are playing in current events.

On a semi-related note, Nielsen is reporting that 24.7 million people watched Obama’s prime time health care press conference. Thanks to online video and YouTube (not to mention DVR), there will likely be many more viewings still to come as well.

On another related note, YouTube is now encouaging video uploaders to share their stats from YouTube Insight on their video pages. The company recently discussed benefits to advertisers and partners.

Update: YouTube has made an official blog post saying they’re ready to start rolling out the new channels design. Here’s a new video about the redesign.
 

YouTube also says that all existing channels will change over to the new design on July 15.

Original Article: Earlier this year, it was discovered that YouTube was "secretly" testing a new design for channels. While there is no official date yet for when this will launch for all users, YouTube says the time is getting closer.

Since the cat escaped the bag, hundreds of thousands of users have managed to find their way to using the new design, the company says. That of course means tons of feedback.

Tons of feedback means that there have been quite a few features added and/or changed. Here is a big list of those features:

- You can now have the full range of ads on your channel

- Sort controls – sort by most viewed, date added, or highest rated

- Ratings stars can now be clicked

- Counts for the number of videos in each section (when in "all" view)

- When playing a video, the video title now links to the non-channel video watch page

- View a small number of video comments as well as leave a quick comment – just click the comments tab when watching any video

- Font size is now larger when browsing through videos

- You can make the list of your playlists your features content set (like the new White House Channel)

- New share controls underneath the video

- Endless loading circles should now be gone

- No more channels with messed up layouts

- Search box when looking at uploads

- Honors are back

- Video thumbnails are now larger

- More interaction options under the video player

- You can now feature a video by URL

- The subscribe button is yellow again

- You can choose a featured video

- You can link directly to a specific video and a specific playlist on your channel

- You can rearrange boxes on your channel with little arrows

- You can message users

- You can delete recent activity items

- Subscribe button appears when you’re looking at your own channel

- UI improvements

- Tons of bug fixes

These are most of the updates that have been made since April. There are still more to go though. A few things YouTube says they’re still looking at include:

- The ability to reorder your uploads, or your lists of playlists

- Making URL autolink (in both the video description, plus the channel profile area)

- Showing the upload date in the video description

- More bug fixes

- And more

There seems to be plenty of feedback flowing, and YouTube is clearly taking it all into consideration and applying changes, where it sees fit. They’ve gotten a lot accomplished in the last couple months, and from the sound of it, it won’t be long until all YouTube users will get to experience the new channels redesign without having to go out of their way to do so.

 What are your thoughts on the new YouTube Channels design? Share.

Earlier this year, it was discovered that YouTube was "secretly" testing a new design for channels. While there is no official date yet for when this will launch for all users, YouTube says the time is getting closer.

Since the cat escaped the bag, hundreds of thousands of users have managed to find their way to using the new design, the company says. That of course means tons of feedback.

Tons of feedback means that there have been quite a few features added and/or changed. Here is a big list of those features:

- You can now have the full range of ads on your channel

- Sort controls – sort by most viewed, date added, or highest rated

- Ratings stars can now be clicked

- Counts for the number of videos in each section (when in "all" view)

- When playing a video, the video title now links to the non-channel video watch page

- View a small number of video comments as well as leave a quick comment – just click the comments tab when watching any video

- Font size is now larger when browsing through videos

- You can make the list of your playlists your features content set (like the new White House Channel)

- New share controls underneath the video

- Endless loading circles should now be gone

- No more channels with messed up layouts

- Search box when looking at uploads

- Honors are back

- Video thumbnails are now larger

- More interaction options under the video player

- You can now feature a video by URL

- The subscribe button is yellow again

- You can choose a featured video

- You can link directly to a specific video and a specific playlist on your channel

- You can rearrange boxes on your channel with little arrows

- You can message users

- You can delete recent activity items

- Subscribe button appears when you’re looking at your own channel

- UI improvements

- Tons of bug fixes

These are most of the updates that have been made since April. There are still more to go though. A few things YouTube says they’re still looking at include:

- The ability to reorder your uploads, or your lists of playlists

- Making URL autolink (in both the video description, plus the channel profile area)

- Showing the upload date in the video description

- More bug fixes

- And more

There seems to be plenty of feedback flowing, and YouTube is clearly taking it all into consideration and applying changes, where it sees fit. They’ve gotten a lot accomplished in the last couple months, and from the sound of it, it won’t be long until all YouTube users will get to experience the new channels redesign without having to go out of their way to do so.

 What are your thoughts on the new YouTube Channels design? Share.

YouTube said today that it will offer a live stream of President Barack Obama’s press conference discussing his first 100 days in office.

"As citizens and pundits from all political perspectives analyze the President’s first 100 days in office today, Obama himself will address the nation tonight on the 100-day anniversary of his inauguration — and we’re going to carry a live stream of the conference from the White House YouTube channel. Be sure to tune in at 8pm EDT to watch it live," wrote Steve Grove, YouTube’s director of new and politics on the company blog.

The YouTube homepage is also featuring political commentary and analysis from major news organizations.

YouTube is encouraging users to upload a video about the Obama’s administration’s first 100 days.

"You can join in the conversation by making a video: How is the Obama Administration doing, and what advice would you give the President moving forward?" writes Grove.

"Upload your thoughts to YouTube and add them as a video response to this Citizentube video, and we’ll feature some of them on our News page tomorrow."