Salesforce Hires to Go Open Source

Oracle has a powerful argument over Salesforce.com : For all its claims to be cutting edge, the Salesforce customer sales software applications delivered through the cloud still rely on Oracle databases for their core functions. That matters, particularly now that Oracle is making direct forays into cloud computing.

Looks like Salesforce is doing something about that.

On Friday, Salesforce started actively looking for engineers skilled in an open source database called PostgreSQL. In a job posting, Salesforce said it needs five engineers now, and 40 to 50 more people next year, for “a huge PostgreSQL project” that would involve “implementing core technology that runs Salesforce.com.”

The recruiter listed on the job posting referred questions about the huge project to Salesforce's communications department.

“We're always evaluating/exploring different technologies,” Andrew Schmitt, a Salesforce spokesman, said in an e-mail. “We have a broad strategy when it comes to data persistence which includes not only Oracle, but also Postgres, HBase, homegrown file storage, etc.”

He also noted that Heroku, a company purchased by Salesforce that enables people to build software applications in the cloud, also uses databases at Amazon Web Services and offers access to Postgres.

Heroku uses cloud technologies that became popular long after Salesforce was established. That is why, though Salesforce bought Heroku for $212 million last year. Heroku operates separate from Salesforce's technology. If Salesforce builds up a Postgres database for that, Salesforce could have a bigger presence in constructing and modifying applications running on its servers.

Much as Salesforce might like to move off of Oracle altogether, for cost as much as bragging rights, completely junking Oracle is probably not an option anytime soon. It is not clear that Postgres could operate at anything like the scale of Salesforce. Even if it can, Salesforce would have to spend a lot of time assuring customers that their data would not be affected. Given the marketing zeal of Salesforce, in fact, it would probably make a case that life was becoming even more fabulous.

TimesCast Media + Tech: Twitter and the Debates

The debates' influence on the broadcasters. Cory Doctorow, digital activist and novelist. Social media meets spoken word poetry.

Cracking the Quantum Safe

Jesse Tise

Rochester

THIS summer, physicists celebrated a triumph that many consider fundamental to our understanding of the physical world: the discovery, after a multibillion-dollar effort, of the Higgs boson.

Given its importance, many of us in the physics community expected the event to earn this year's Nobel Prize in Physics. Instead, the award went to achievements in a field far less well known and vastly less expensive: quantum information.

It may not catch as many headlines as the hunt for elusive particles, but the field of quantum information may soon answer questions even more fundamental - and upsetting - than the ones that drove the search for the Higgs. It could well usher in a radical new era of technology, one that makes today's fastest computers look like hand-cranked adding machines.

The basis for both the work behind the Higgs search and quantum information theory is quantum physics, the most accurate and powerful theory in all of science. With it we created remarkable technologies like the transistor and the laser, which, in time, were transformed into devices - computers and iPhones - that reshaped human culture.

But the very usefulness of quantum physics masked a disturbing dissonance at its core. There are mysteries - summed up neatly in Werner Heisenberg's famous adage “atoms are not things” - lurking at the heart of quantum physics suggesting that our everyday assumptions about reality are no more than illusions.

Take the “principle of superposition,” which holds that things at the subatomic level can be literally two places at once. Worse, it means they can be two things at once. This superposition animates the famous parable of Schrödinger's cat, whereby a wee kitty is left both living and dead at the same time because its fate depends on a superposed quantum particle.

For decades such mysteries were debated but never pushed toward resolution, in part because no resolution seemed possible and, in part, because useful work could go on without resolving them (an attitude sometimes called “shut up and calculate”). Scientists could attract money and press with ever larger supercolliders while ignoring such pesky questions.

But as this year's Nobel recognizes, that's starting to change. Increasingly clever experiments are exploiting advances in cheap, high-precision lasers and atomic-scale transistors. Quantum information studies often require nothing more than some equipment on a table and a few graduate students. In this way, quantum information's progress has come not by bludgeoning nature into submission but by subtly tricking it to step into the light.

Take the superposition debate. One camp claims that a deeper level of reality lies hidden beneath all the quantum weirdness. Once the so-called hidden variables controlling reality are exposed, they say, the strangeness of superposition will evaporate.

Another camp claims that superposition shows us that potential realities matter just as much as the single, fully manifested one we experience. But what collapses the potential electrons in their two locations into the one electron we actually see? According to this interpretation, it is the very act of looking; the measurement process collapses an ethereal world of potentials into the one real world we experience.

And a third major camp argues that particles can be two places at once only because the universe itself splits into parallel realities at the moment of measurement, one universe for each particle location - and thus an infinite number of ever splitting parallel versions of the universe (and us) are all evolving alongside one another.

These fundamental questions might have lived forever at the intersection of physics and philosophy. Then, in the 1980s, a steady advance of low-cost, high-precision lasers and other “quantum optical” technologies began to appear. With these new devices, researchers, including this year's Nobel laureates, David J. Wineland and Serge Haroche, could trap and subtly manipulate individual atoms or light particles. Such exquisite control of the nano-world allowed them to design subtle experiments probing the meaning of quantum weirdness.

Soon at least one interpretation, the most common sense version of hidden variables, was completely ruled out.

A professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester and the author of “About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on October 14, 2012, on page SR8 of the New York edition with the headline: Cracking the Quantum Safe.

Microsoft Pushes Into Music Again

Microsoft Makes New Push Into Music

Microsoft's Xbox Music service will begin appearing on the Xbox game console this week.

SEATTLE - Music fans have often viewed Microsoft as something like a bad cover band, one that pumped out uninviting facsimiles of Apple's iPod and iTunes with its Zune music players and service.

Now that the Zune brand is dead, Microsoft is once again in search of a hit in digital music. But this time, to improve its odds of success, it is marshaling some of its most powerful brands as never before: Windows and the Xbox.

On Monday, the company plans to announce a service called Xbox Music that will offer access to a global catalog of about 30 million songs. The service will let consumers listen free to any song on computers and tablets running the latest version of its Windows software, as well as on the Xbox console. Microsoft will not initially limit how much music can be streamed, though that could change over time.

The service is part of a broad set of bets Microsoft is making this fall to help regain ground it has lost to competitors, especially Apple and Google. In addition to Windows 8, a major new version of its flagship operating system that will start shipping Oct. 26, the company is close to releasing a new version of its Windows Phone operating system for mobile phones and its first Microsoft-designed computer, a tablet device called Surface.

In an aggressive push to persuade lots of people to use the service, Microsoft will package the software for Xbox Music with Windows 8. The arrangement could awaken antitrust concerns about Microsoft's use of Windows to gain toeholds in new markets.

Microsoft's do-over in the market is a sign of how a strong music service has come to be seen as a prerequisite for any serious player in the gadget business. Apple first showed the way with that strategy by making it simple to buy songs from the iTunes Store, helping it sell more iPods. Google and Amazon have also gotten in on the act, adding music stores to their Android and Kindle devices.

In addition to competing with those big companies, Xbox Music is entering a landscape thick with independent music services that offer their own variations on the listening experience. Spotify, for example, provides on-demand listening to a large library of music, while Pandora programs radio stations tailored to its listeners' individual tastes.

Scott Porter, principal program manager for Xbox Music, said many music fans today relied on a variety of services like those, along with more traditional sellers of songs like iTunes, to satisfy all their musical needs. This approach, though, can be tedious.

“The dilemma is that music has become work,” he said. “Our vision for Xbox Music is that it shouldn't have to be work.”

Xbox Music incorporates elements of all of those services. There is an option to buy songs, so a music fan can own them permanently with minimal restrictions. There are Pandora-like radio stations built around songs and similar-sounding music.

And there is an option akin to Spotify that lets users listen free to any music from their computer, though they will get audio and visual advertisements. (Some major bands, like the Beatles, are missing from the catalog.) Like Spotify, Xbox Music offers a $10-a-month ad-free service that includes many other features, like the ability to listen to music on smartphones and the Xbox 360 game console.

While finding music on other services can sometimes feel like studying a glorified spreadsheet, Xbox Music is much richer visually, with artist photos that can be flipped through quickly.

Analysts say the success of Xbox Music will depend on far more than whether the service itself is any good, since the strategy is to have it enhance the appeal of Microsoft-powered gadgets that have much broader functions. “This is not going to matter if no one wants the devices,” said Richard Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG Research. “You need to have a killer device.”

That will be tricky on phones. The first smartphones on which the service will be available are those running a new version of Microsoft's mobile operating system, Windows Phone, which has struggled to gain traction.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 15, 2012, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: New Push By Microsoft Into Music.

Sprint Agrees to Sell Majority Stake to SoftBank

4:15 a.m. Monday | Updated

The struggling cellphone service provider Sprint Nextel has agreed to sell 70 percent of itself to SoftBank of Japan for $20.1 billion, its boldest move yet to revive its fortunes.

In a statement on Monday, SoftBank, a big Japanese telecommunications company, said it would pay $8 billion to buy newly issued Sprint stock worth about $5.25 a share. It will then pay $12.1 billion to buy existing stock from other investors at $7.30 a share, a premium to current levels.

The deal remains subject to approval by regulators and Sprint's shareholders, but has been approved by the boards of both companies, SoftBank said in the statement. The transaction is expected to close in the middle of 2013.

Shares in Sprint have risen 14 percent since the wireless company confirmed on Thursday that it was in negotiations with SoftBank, closing at $5.73 on Friday.

Sprint is also working to gain mor e control over Clearwire, a wireless broadband company in which it owns a large stake, people familiar with the matter said. But closing the transaction with SoftBank is the biggest priority for now.

Once completed, the deal would give Sprint some much-needed cash as it aims to compete against its bigger rivals, Verizon Wireless and AT&T.

Sprint, which has long struggled to recover from its 2005 merger with Nextel, has been spending billions of dollars to build a next-generation data network to support the latest smartphones like the Apple iPhone 5.

It remains well behind Verizon and AT&T in offering Long-Term Evolution, or LTE, data service, though the company is well ahead of T-Mobile USA, the country's fourth-largest wireless service provider.

At the same time, Sprint is laboring under nearly $21 billion of debt, some of which is set to mature next year.

And if a proposed merger of T-Mobile and MetroPCS is completed, Sprint will face a toughe r competitor in the world of lower-priced cellphone service. Both companies have pitched unlimited data plans to customers at lower costs than those for plans offered by the big two providers.

Sprint has often hinted that deal-making was in its future. Its chief executive, Daniel Hesse, has said that he expects to participate in the industry's continuing consolidation.

But the deal with SoftBank came as a surprise to many analysts and investors. Until now, the Japanese company has been focused on gaining share in its home market, largely through acquisitions and building out an LTE high-speed data network. And until recently, it had been focused on reducing its enormous debt load, which stood at nearly $13 billion as of June 30.

Shares of SoftBank fell nearly 17 percent after it confirmed the talks last week and dropped another 5.3 percent, closing at 2,268 yen apiece, in trading in Tokyo on Monday.

Still, the Japanese company's chief executive, Masay oshi Son, has harbored ambitions to move into the much bigger American market. Sprint has been one of the few significant players up for grabs, and may eventually serve as a vehicle for future deals - perhaps even one for the enlarged T-Mobile, several years from now.

The two sides are betting that American government regulators will favor any transaction that strengthens competition, avoiding the harsh opposition to AT&T's $39 billion bid for T-Mobile last year.

Mr. Son, an Internet entrepreneur, had already broken into an industry dominated by two established rivals when he bought Vodafone's Japanese arm in 2006. He has steadily built the company into a major new competitor, one poised to become Japan's second-biggest wireless service provider, after NTT DoCoMo, with the acquisition of a smaller rival, eAccess.

The Raine Group and Mizuho Securities were lead financial advisers to SoftBank. Deutsche Bank also provided legal advice. SoftBank's legal ad visers included Morrison & Foerster as lead counsel, Mori Hamada & Matsumoto as Japanese counsel, Dow Lohnes as regulatory counsel, Potter Anderson Corroon LLP as Delaware counsel, and Foulston & Siefkin LLP as Kansas counsel.

Citigroup, Rothschild and UBS advised Sprint. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom was lead counsel to Sprint. Lawler, Metzger, Keeney & Logan served as regulatory counsel, and Polsinelli Shughart served as Kansas counsel.

A version of this article appeared in print on 10/15/2012, on page B3 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Sprint Said to Be in Final Stages of Selling Most of Itself to SoftBank of Japan.

The Data-Mining Industry Kicks Off a Public Relations Campaign

The Direct Marketing Association, a trade group in Manhattan, introduced a $1 million public relations campaign on Monday morning with a lofty title: the “Data-Driven Marketing Institute.”

The purpose of the effort is to buff the image and forestall regulation of the consumer data-mining industry. This industry consists of business-to-business companies, known as data brokers, that collect, share, analyze and sell information about consumers' online and off-line behaviors in order to tailor marketing pitches to them.

According to a statement, the trade group intends to promote such targeted marketing to lawmakers and the public “with the goal of preventing needless regulation or enforcement that could severely hamper consumer marketing and stifle innovation” as well as “tamping down unfavorable media attention.” As part of the campaign, the group plans to finance academic research into the industry's economic impact, said Linda A. Woolley, the actin g chief executive of the Direct Marketing Association.

The group planned to announce the campaign during its annual conference in Las Vegas. It comes as legislators in both the United States House and the Senate have opened investigations into the practices of leading data brokers. Separately, the Federal Trade Commission is also investigating certain firms and has called on the industry to increase transparency. Some legislators, regulators and privacy advocates have said they are worried that unregulated collection of marketing data about people's personal, health and or financial concerns had the potential to result in unfair pricing or inferior service for some consumers.

Ms. Woolley said the industry's public relations effort was intended to counteract those concerns.

“We want to set the record straight on what we think has been a lot of mischaracterization of what we do and to explain the benefits of data-driven marketing to consumers,” Ms. Woolle y said.

One issue the campaign is not designed to address, however, is a recommendation from the F.T.C. earlier this year that the industry set up a public Web portal where consumers could learn about the practices of data brokers and about consumer choices for accessing or deleting information collected about them. Ms. Woolley said so many different types of companies collected or used consumer data for marketing purposes that a public Web portal would be unfeasible.

Still, when consumers learn that third-party companies may collect information about their purchasing records and tastes, at least some people say they would like to be able to see the marketing records data brokers hold about them and have some control over them, said Chuck Teller, the founder of Catalog Choice, a company that helps consumers limit the catalogs, coupons and other direct-mail pitches they receive.

About 67 percent of people who answered a recent e-mail questionnaire sent out b y his company said they felt it was very important for them to be able to see the information that data brokers collected about them, while about 78 percent said they felt it was very important to be able to opt out of the distribution and sale of information about them, Mr. Teller said.

“It's pretty clear that consumers want to opt out of the use of their data by companies they don't do business with,” Mr. Teller said.

Daily Report: Joining the Party, Not Crashing It

You're at a dinner party, and conversation stalls over an urgent question - like how tall is the Statue of Liberty? What do you do? You pull out your phone and Google the answer, of course.

But, as Claire Cain Miller reports in Monday's New York Times, although Google knows it is the uninvited guest at social gatherings everywhere, it wants to figure out new, less intrusive ways to join the party - as varied as voice search, Internet-connected glasses and other wearable computers, or dining room tables outfitted with screens.

It's all part of what's known as ubiquitous computing or intelligence augmentation - the idea that computers will no longer be devices we turn on, but will be so integrated into our everyday environment that we can ask them to do things without ever lifting a finger.

For example, in Apple's new iPhone, Siri, the voice-activated assistant, can answer questions about current movies, sports and restaurants. And Microsoft is experiment ing with computers that understand gestures and voice, like gloves with sensors, Bing voice search on the Xbox and gesture recognition on the Kinect. But Google is at the forefront on these efforts.

Google is developing mobile search apps for Android phones and iPhones that let people ask questions aloud and listen to Google answer in a vaguely robotic woman's voice. In May, the company introduced a quicker way to answer trivia-type queries in search.

And although Google Glass, eyeglass frames that let people use the Web on a tiny screen near their temples, are not yet for sale, they will let people find answers without reaching into their pockets. So will other wearable computers that Google plans to experiment with, like watches.

Meanwhile, how tall is the Statue of Liberty? 305 feet.

 

In the High-Tech Patent Wars, an Inventor\'s Lament

A long, narrative article we ran last week on the challenges facing the patent system, “The Patent, Used as a Sword,” prompted a lot of comments, and we posted more than 275 of them.

But I thought it might be worthwhile to present one more - an extended commentary from one of the sources who made a cameo appearance in the piece, Stephen G. Perlman. In the article, Mr. Perlman was a counterpoint to the main focus of the piece, which was big companies using patents as tools and weapons in the smartphone patent wars. (What he says below comes from both earlier interviews, and a lengthy e-mail he sent after the article ran.)

Mr. Perlman is a successful inventor and entrepreneur. He helped design Apple's Quicktime multimedia software. Over the years, his start-up ventures have ranged from WebTV, for bringing Internet services to television (sold to Microsoft in 1997 for $425 million), to Mova, for producing extraordinarily detailed computer-generated facial imag ery like the reverse-aging of Brad Pitt's face in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” which won an Academy Award.

The latest creation of his San Francisco invention factory, Rearden, is a technology called DIDO, which Mr. Perlman thinks promises a breakthrough in wireless communications - speeds of more than 100 times faster than current cell networks, without the need for cell towers.

Mr. Perlman holds about 100 granted patents with roughly the same number of applications pending. He knows what each patent does, and has never sold one. “It's a very different breed of patent,” he said, “than we're seeing with the clash of the smartphone titans, with truckloads of patents for minor sub-features being bought and sold like commodities.”

“There are patents, and then there are fundamental patents,” he added. “In my world, we deal with fundamental patents.”

The different breeds of patents, according to Mr. Perlman, reflect different k inds of innovation. Most innovation is incremental, he says. “Incrementalism is 99 percent of what corporate research and development does,” Mr. Perlman said, adding:  ”Heavens, that is not to say it isn't vitally important. Where would we be without it.”

What Mr. Perlman labels incrementalism is what others call integrated innovation. By that, they mean that increasingly complex products, like smartphones, are triumphs of melding many different technologies - each, to be sure, a smallish step rather than breakthrough.

Again, Mr. Perlman does not belittle the incremental path. Speaking of smartphones, he said, “Man, it's incredible what they've done.”

But, Mr. Perlman wrote in an e-mail: “The problem is that fundamental patents are lumped together with incremental patents. And, as the world is trying to mitigate the over-litigation of incremental patents and patent offices are buried under them, little guys like us are just being steamrolled over. And it's not accidental steamrolling.”

“Incumbents with a deep vested interest in maintaining the status quo,” he continued, “see the screwed-up patent system as a means to disrupt our ability to bring breakthroughs to market.”

That kind of big-company gamesmanship played a role, Mr. Perlman suggests, in the recent bankruptcy of one of his start-ups, OnLive. The company had developed a wireless streaming technology for delivering online games and office productivity applications to tablet computers, with photo-realistic images and high-speed performance. In a review earlier this year, David Pogue of The Times called OnLive “jaw-dropping, extremely polished technology.”

Part of the problem for OnLive, Mr. Perlman said, was that it was five years before government patent examiners looked at the application for its basic patent - and three years more before it was granted. All the while, Mr. Perlman said, OnLive could not enforce its patent or use its patent asset to help raise further funding.

In August, OnLive went through a form of bankruptcy, called assignment for the benefit of creditors, and shareholders including Mr. Perlman lost their investment and employees were laid off. The OnLive service continues to operate.

Workday\'s I.P.O.: \'The Incumbents Are Not Prepared\'

On Friday, Workday held one of the most anticipated enterprise tech initial public offerings of the year, closing at $48.69 a share, up 74 percent. The company pocketed about $675 million. Even more than money, its co-founder says, Workday bought itself credibility for a coming battle with competitors like Oracle and SAP.

Workday sells cloud-based software that is used to run human resources and corporate financial systems. When you aim to sell that to big business, “being public matters,” said Aneel Bhusri, the co-founder and Workday's chairman and co-chief executive. “A lot of companies are conservative, and maybe got burned in the Internet bubble 10 years ago. Companies they worked with went out of business.”

Now, he said, Workday and a few other enterprise software companies would challenge bigger incumbents, which have more applications but are shifting from an older model to delivering software as a service via the cloud. In this case, big enterpr ise software companies like Oracle have snapped up a lot of their competitors, and are trying to use their market power to sell companies on buying everything from them.

“Oracle's products are a mishmash” of different kinds of software, Mr. Bhusri said. “It's the same for SAP.”

Other newcomers have posited a contest between many cloud companies offering mix-and- match applications that customers buy, versus incumbents locking customers into a cloud-based “stack” of computing power and applications. Mr. Bhusri thought there would be some choice, but also the domination of a few new companies according to broad areas of business expertise, with Workday at the center of one of them.

The Workday I.P.O., Mr. Bhusri said, completes a four-part model of cloud-based enterprise software. The first cloud, exemplified by Salesforce.com, he says, concentrates on customer-facing software, like sales and customer collaboration products. The second, occupied b y Workday, looks inward to the processes that run the business.

An information technology automation cloud, which Mr. Bhusri says is dominated by ServiceNow, is the third element. ServiceNow went public in August. A fourth cloud would consist of business- and industry-specific applications developed by independent consultants and in-house engineers.

“From a customer standpoint, if you can get the best of breed from each, throw in Google for e-mail and documents, how is that not better? How is a large vendor going to compete?” Mr. Bhusri says.

While the argument about corporate software rests on tech trends, on a human level Workday also looks like a revenge play. Mr. Bhusri's co-founder and co-chief executive is David Duffield, who started PeopleSoft, a human resources software company. Mr. Bhusri made his career working closely with Mr. Duffield, but after the two men left it, PeopleSoft stumbled. Mr. Duffield tried to come back, but PeopleSoft was pur chased by Oracle in 2005. Mr. Duffield, a billionaire, set up a fund for PeopleSoft employees adversely affected by the takeover, and began working with Mr. Bhusri on Workday.

“This is the start of a 20-year battle,” Mr. Bhusri said Friday. “The incumbents are not prepared.”

Video of Baumgartner\'s Supersonic Free Fall

Video highlights of an Austrian daredevil's plunge to earth from the edge of space on Sunday.

As my colleague John Tierney reports, Felix Baumgartner, a former Austrian paratrooper, made the highest and fastest jump in history on Sunday, after ascending by a helium balloon to an altitude of 128,100 feet.

Stepping from a capsule tethered to the balloon, the daredevil plunged to Earth, reaching a maximum speed measured at 833.9 miles per hour, or Mach 1.24, becoming the first human to break the sound barrier under his own power, before opening his parachute.

The jump was broadcast on live television and streamed on a one-minute delay on YouTube, where it was watched by millions of viewers. A 90-second highlight reel, which includes images shot from the sky-diver's suit, was posted online by the sponsor, the Austrian energy drink company Red Bull.

The Guardian uploaded video of the entire four-and-a-half-minute jump, taken from the live broadcast.

Although the total cost of the Red Bull Stratos project was not revealed, it was believed to be somewhat more than the $400 two Canadian teenagers spent to send a Lego man bearing a Canadian flag about 80,000 feet above the Earth's surface in January.

A Canadian “legonaut” journeyed 80,000 feet above the Earth and back again, and has the video to prove it.

Disruptions: Seeking Privacy in a Networked Age

A pulled pork taco hovered about four inches from my mouth when my phone impolitely interrupted me. “Hey, I see you're having people over. O.K. if I stop by?” read a text message from someone whom I had not invited to my dinner party.

How did the person know I was even having a party? I needed only to glance at my guests, who were sharing messages and photos of the dinner to their online social networks.

Call it the latest episode of “Nothing's Private Anymore.”

While you're going about your daily life, stopping to get coffee with a crush, meeting friends for drinks or going to a Madonna concert, people are watching you on Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Path and an interminable list of other social networks.

“But wait,” you're saying to yourself, “I didn't ask to be on this show.” [Laughter from the audience.] Too late - you have no choice.

“But … but … I didn't update any of these services to announce what I'm doing. I'm not even on Facebook.” [More laughter.] You don't have to be, since other people can announce your location, and share pictures and videos of you, conveniently tagged with your name for anyone to find quickly.

Social stalking doesn't just happen to people like me, an inveterate social networker who covers this subject for work; it happens to normal people, too. While it can be merely a nuisance when others put you on public view, it can have serious unintended consequences when people discover things you had intended to keep private.

Your former spouse is watching. Your boss? Yup, she's watching, too. Your mother, father and probably Uncle Pete.

This happened at the dinner party I had last week.

What else besides tacos was on the menu? Well, that isn't hard to determine either.

I certainly didn't tweet or share information like that on Facebook, but many of the 15 people in attendance did.

I know that because a few days later, on a work -related call, someone else - who has never stepped foot in my house - told me how much he “just loved” the lamps hanging above my kitchen table.

Over the course of the three-hour dinner, my friends posted seven photos on Path, sent six Twitter messages (five with photos), six photos on Instagram and two people checked in on Foursquare.

When I added up the collective follower counts of the people in the room, my little dinner party was potentially viewed by more people than watch “The Late Show” on CBS: over three million. (Granted, the guests included social media heavyweights like Om Malik, founder of the popular tech blog GigaOM, and Veronica Belmont, an online video host with 1.6 million Twitter followers.)

“I don't think it's the norm for most people yet; it is though for the microcosms that are Silicon Valley or South by Southwest,” said Dennis Crowley, the chief executive of Foursquare. “But, at the same time, I think those things predi ct the future and the way the tech elite act now is the way everyone will experience the world a few years from now.”

Before that happens, customers might force companies into letting them “cloak” themselves for a particular time period. “You can imagine a service that says ‘I don't want my name to show up on any social services for the next three hours' and then integrates with other social services,” Mr. Crowley said.

A feature that allowed users to opt out of being mentioned could actually benefit companies like Facebook and Twitter. It would entice people who are afraid of being in the cast of “Nothing's Private Anymore” to sign up, knowing that they can hide at any given time.

Mr. Malik said he had simply resigned himself to the reality that most of the things he does in public, no matter how banal, will end up on the Internet. “But an offline switch would be a welcome addition for it would give me an illusion of privateness (if not p rivacy),” he wrote in an e-mail.

But until that exists, if I don't want people sharing pictures of me at a dinner party, I may have to resort to posting an old piece of technology called a sheet of paper with the message (in less than 140 characters): “Please don't check in on Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, Path, Myspace or any other service. #thanks!”