Robert

I love Facebook. I also hate it. And sometimes I'm indifferent, but not often.

As the big IPO day looms closer, lots of folks are taking a second look at this thing that started out as kind of a goofy diversion for college kids and has grown into the beast with 900 million heads.

Many enterprises are reluctant to move critical cloud applications out of their own data centers and into the public cloud due to security concerns. Yet the same automated, consistent provisioning that is essential to managing either public or private clouds (as well as to the process of thinking through a cloud deployment) can also offer the fringe benefit of improving security.

Of course, not all cloud management tools work equally well with all cloud providers, nor do they all allow customers to manage their internal and external clouds as a single unit. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers such as Amazon, for example, typically don't allow customers to tweak the network and storage infrastructure beneath the operating system, forcing customers to trust that level of security to the vendor.

Want a piece of the Facebook IPO action next week? Odds are you won't be able to muscle your way in past all the VCs and institutional investors that are going to cash out majorly when the world's biggest social network becomes the world's biggest tech public offering.

No worries. A site called GiveAshare will happily sell you one share of Facebook Preferred, framed and with a custom plaque of your choosing. I warn you, though, it's not likely to be cheap.

In the battle for the title of Most Inept Tech Company, the competition is fierce. There's of course Yahoo, which has been a contender since the mid-2000s when then-CEO Terry Semel tried to turn it into an online Hollywood studio before draining it of $300-plus million in salary. The soap opera there shows no sign of abating, with Resumegate still in full throttle as I write this.

There's MySpace, the one-time market-defining social network that got bought by Rupert Murdoch for $580 million and sold by him six years later for $35 million. The new owners just settled with the FTC this week after its Fox forebears lied about sharing its users' personal information with advertisers. (A Rupert Murdoch company caught in a lie? Who'd have thunk it?) It's a strong contender too.

Ah, Yahoo -- it gives and it gives and it gives, and what does it ask for in return? Only snickering mixed with incredulity. Just when it looked like things couldn't get worse for the Web 1.0 giant that cannot seem to make it in a 2.0 world, the bottom fell further.

It turns out that freshly minted CEO Scott Thompson, who has claimed to have a degree in computer science from Stonehill College since his days at PayPal, doesn't actually have a degree in computer science but rather in accounting. (For the record, I would never consider padding my resume to include a fake degree. No sir, not me.)

Remember how surprised Google was when it found out that its Street View vans had slurped up some 600GB of juicy personal information from unprotected Wi-Fi networks as they drove by snapping photos of our homes?

It turns out Google knew about it all along but did nothing to stop it. Oops.

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and get your front-row seats. For a limited time only, the Oracle-Google Larry & Larry Circus will be performing in the big tent, otherwise known as the U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

Already this week, Google CEO Larry Page chased fellow clowns Sergey and Eric through the courtroom with a seltzer bottle, while Oracle chief Larry Ellison rode around the jury on an elephant. (We think it was an elephant; it may have just been one of his attorneys.)

This week saw two somewhat conflicting reports on our current state of insecurity. The news ain't good, but it's better than you might expect.

First up, Verizon released its eighth annual Data Breach Investigations report [PDF]. The star of this report: our old friends Anonymous.

As someone who's been in this business since mammals were still the new quadrupeds on the block, I've probably logged 3,000-plus hours on the phone with tech support for various companies. The pain threshold for those experiences has always been somewhere between having oral surgery without anesthetic and attending a Justin Bieber concert without earplugs.

Over the last few years, though, getting gear fixed has become much less painful, and the reason is simple: remote support. Letting the geeks take control of my PC over the Net and fix it while I watch has finally made tech calls bearable, if not exactly pleasant.

My family vacation in Florida last week was heaven, but the travel was hell. From dealing with air carrier woes to an extreme traffic jam in Orlando, we had more than our share of issues. When problems cropped up, we turned to a few basic iPhone apps in the clutch. The apps we used were enormously helpful in some cases. In others, not so much. Here's two things I learned about using the iPhone in a travel pinch.

App schmap: In a crisis a live travel agent beats a travel app every time

Salesforce ChatterWhether your company is a small shop of just a few intensely hard-working pros or a large venture with hundreds or thousands of workers, good communication is critical to your success. And by "good communication," I mean communication that works. With the right collaboration tools and a little operational discipline, you can overcome any communications challenge and get your teams in sync.

When I started my career back in the olden days of the 20th Century, the workplace was largely synchronous. For the most part, everyone showed up at more or less the same time, worked in the same office together, went to the same meetings, ate lunch at 12:30, and gathered around the same water cooler when they felt like taking a break. Communication wasn't always of the highest quality, but there was plenty of it and if you missed something, somebody was always right there to fill you in.