The Like sign may just reflect the sentiments of the city of Menlo Park, a mostly affluent suburb that is sure to receive a windfall in taxes from the arrival of its new tenant, which has made the city the new center of Silicon Valley.

But the sign is also turned away from East Palo Alto, a neighboring low-income community of color adjacent to Menlo Park. That city will be the gateway to Facebook for many commuters and may be the future home of some of the 9,000-plus employees who are expected to work at the new location. And while the rest of the Valley celebrates the expansion of the new company that is redefining how the world communicates and uses technology, East Palo Alto residents say they see more of the same: another powerful Silicon Valley corporation that will benefit at the expense, and perhaps displacement, of their city.

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Facebook, where you can create an entire album of your drunken, vomity, relieving-yourself-into-a-sink exploits, where you can share images of your child happily sliding around in his own diarrhea, has long maintained a surprisingly prim attitude toward the comparatively tame issue of breast-feeding shots. Though the company insists that "breastfeeding is natural and beautiful," and that "the vast majority of … photos are compliant with our policies, and we will not take action on them," it also maintains that "photos that show a fully exposed breast where the child is not actively engaged in nursing do violate Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities." Photos that are taken down, Facebook says, "are almost exclusively brought to our attention by other users who complain about them."

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A month later, Zuckerberg and Cameron had a follow-up conversation, later posted on YouTube. Cameron, dressed in suit and tie, chatted with Zuckerberg, who wore a blue cotton T-shirt. “Basically, we’ve got a big problem here,” Cameron pointed out to Zuckerberg, describing the U.K.’s financial woes.

Zuckerberg outlined how Facebook could be used as a platform to decrease spending and increase public participation in the political process: “I mean  all these people have great ideas and a lot of energy that they want to bring, and I think for a lot of people it’s just about having an easy and a cheap way for them too to communicate  their ideas.”

“Brilliant,” Cameron said.

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Apparently I'm the minority here. Last week, a study of 1,007 parents with children between 10 and 14 found that a stunning half of all parents of 12-year-olds -- and 20 percent of parents of 10-year-olds -- knew that their children were on Facebook. Amazingly, nearly 70 percent of those parents helped their children sign up. Facebook's terms of service prohibit users under the age of 13 from registering. The study certainly confirms what I've noticed over the past year: the increasing presence of my friends' children "liking" their statuses and LOLing their photos.

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Why? I wondered almost immediately. These were people to whom I hadn’t spoken in more than 15 years, people I hadn’t much liked at the time, people with whom I’d had little in common besides geographic proximity and attendance at the same underperforming high school in central Virginia. I regretted it instantly, but tried not to worry. After all, I’m Facebook friends with plenty of people I don’t know well or like much, second cousins in south Florida, random playgroup moms, people I’ve met on planes or at Starbucks. What did it really matter -- having a few more virtual strangers in my life. That was what I thought. Then, a day or two later, I read one of their posts.

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First, it gives people who have something to say an unprecedented audience that’s both instantaneous and quintessentially democratic. The eulogy is no longer the preserve of the great and the good. Online, anyone can be a broadcaster, a commentator or a curator of news and information.

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Facebook also added a "Ticker" at the top right hand side of the page, which provided a real-time Twitter-like stream of status updates from all my friends. When I first checked it, it was packed with complaints about the new interface change. Judging solely from comments from my friends, people don't want Facebook deciding what's most important, Facebook's suggestions were wrong, irrelevant and insulting, and why oh why oh why can't Facebook leave a good thing alone?

Oh, and people hate change. And, goddammit, they're switching to Google+ (which conveniently opened its doors to the general public today), or Twitter, or giving up on the Internet altogether.

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Two innocuous words on their own, but unsettling when read in a computer screen subject line, sent from a former lover. Of course, I remembered him. In the era before email and text messages, when physical interaction was the most direct form of communication, he caught my waist as I moved across a room. He caught my waist and whispered, "You are so hot."

It was John Edwards' undoing, and it was mine.

When I received his Facebook message 13 years later, it shook me. I read two words, but I remembered an entire essay of details. His tan body, the lingering scent of cologne on my pillowcase, Sarah McLachlan on repeat, a cream-colored sweater, and waves breaking along the surf.

"Now there's a name I haven't heard in a million lifetimes," I typed. As an afterthought, I added, "How are you?" but it seemed inadequate.

We shared a night backlit by the glow of a South Carolina moon. There was an early morning sunrise, too. He was headed to California for a career in law enforcement, and I was preparing for social work in Ohio.

If it had been a Hollywood movie, he would have stayed. Or I would have gone with him. Or we would have agreed to meet a year later on the top of the Empire State Building. At the very least, I would have given him my telephone number.

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If you've had enough of the depressing news for the week, feast those things in your ocular cavities on these 10 pop culture stories that we've culled from the Internet and beyond! (But mostly the Internet.) They aren't here to make you feel OK again, but maybe they'll take your mind off the fact that the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

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In the media and political arenas, we've seen paparazzi culture famously fetishize the outing of anonymous iconoclasts, from Watergate's Deep Throat (Mark Felt) to a top CIA agent working on weapons of mass destruction (Valerie Plame). Likewise, in our communities, we now know that we are almost always being monitored in highly trafficked parks, malls, airports and stadiums -- and as Slate recently reported, we may soon have apps on all of our smartphones that let us identify random faces in a crowd.

Teeming with incognito bloggers and commenters, the Internet seemed to be the last bulwark against this trend -- a rare public space that let us broadcast opinions from the shadows. But even cyberspace will likely be exposed to the white-hot spotlight of identity, as a new campaign for disclosure now starts in earnest.

Launched in response to cyber-bullying, this campaign made headlines last month when Facebook executive Randi Zuckerberg declared that "anonymity on the Internet has to go away." Her statement echoed that of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who previously called for "true transparency and no anonymity" on the Web.

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Call it a coincidence, but now it seems China wants a piece of the action.

Last month, analysts who monitor China's gargantuan sovereign wealth fund detected signs that a deal was in the works to buy a huge stake in Facebook. Neve rmind that access to Facebook has been blocked in China since 2009.

The fund, known as the China Investment Corporation (CIC), is a $332 billion portfolio that seeks to earn money from the government's massive export earnings. It operates in almost complete secrecy, as do many sovereign wealth funds in the Persian Gulf, Russia and elsewhere. These have grown into major economic players over the past 20 years.

But a number of high-profile investment websites have quoted "inside sources" describing efforts by Citibank to secure for China a stake in Facebook large enough "to matter," according to Business Insider. Citibank, incidentally, is undertaking a major expansion in China.

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Here's the story: Over the weekend, several Anonymous members were banished from the Mountain View search giant's buzzy new social network, Google+, apparently because content they hosted on their accounts violated the service's community standards. You might expect that the Web marauders -- responsible as they have been for high-profile hacks of Visa, Amazon, Pay Pal and, most recently, the U.S. military -- would retaliate with a full-out assault on Google. That isn't the case, though. Instead, they've decided to fight fire with fire. They're aligning with another organization called Presstorm to start their own social network: AnonPlus.

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How did this happen? Early today, stories began popping up on Twitter and other social-networking sites hinting at the actor's demise, with links promising "breaking news" on the event. To be fair, considering where we left the warlock, it wouldn't be unreasonable to wonder whether his winning luck had run out.

Fortunately for Sheen, he's not dead. He's just been taking a really long nap, according to a recent tweet from the actor's account.

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I stuck with that for a little while. But there were two big problems.

First, I was bombarded with friend requests from people I barely knew or didn't know at all. Why? It soon became clear that large numbers of people weren't approaching Facebook with the reality principle in mind. They were playing the usual online game of racking up big numbers to feel important. "Friend count" was the new "unique visitors."

Then Facebook started to get massive. And consultants and authors started giving us advice about how to use Facebook to brand ourselves. And marketing people began advocating that we use Facebook to sell stuff and, in fact, sell ourselves.

So which was Facebook: a new space for authentic communication between real people -- or a new arena for self-promotion?

I could probably have handled this existential dilemma. And I know it's one that a lot of people simply don't care about. It bugged me, but it was the other Facebook problem that made me not want to use the service at all.

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Opinions on the service run the gamut. Here's a look at key early reaction:

The New York Times' Claire Cain Miller notes that Google's difficulties in the realm of social media have already taken a toll on its status as "entry point" to the Internet, and wonders if Google+ can really help make up for lost time:

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1. Justin Bieber and Tiffani Thiessen have a creepy crush on each other: As evidenced by the shirts the two wore to Canada's MuchMusic Video Awards, bearing each other's faces. Bieber was born one year after "Saved by the Bell" went off the air.

2. James Blunt's blunder: Put a photo of himself on Facebook in front of a historical building near Auschwitz, then claimed it was his "hotel in Poland."

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