It’s been a while since we heard anything meaningful about the tablet formerly known as the CrunchPad. The device, now named JooJoo, has been overshadowed in a serious way by the Apple iPad. As much as I would like to dissuade everyone from buying one of these things, I know someone will. If you’re willing to dive into one of the more ridiculous tech situations of our time, though, you’ll be waiting to get your hands on your newest gadget. The JooJoo has been officially delayed until March 25th.

Earlier this month, Fusion Garage’s JooJoo Internet tablet went into full production with an anticipated on-time delivery to consumers at the end of February. Last week, the company became aware of a manufacturing issue involving JooJoo’s industry-first 12.1 inch capacitive touch screen which Fusion Garage was quickly able to diagnose and rectify. The company now forecasts the JooJoo will be sent to consumers on March 25.

The manufacturing issue centers on fine tuning the touch sensitivity of the capacitive screen. Fusion Garage will be providing all pre-order customers with a free JooJoo accessory to compensate for the delay in the delivery of their JooJoo.

That’s the official word from Fusion Garage. As nice as the JooJoo seems, the delays and impending litigation are enough to keep me away from the device. To be honest I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the first of many delays.

This weekend Zuckerberg sat down with Michael Arrington to talk Facebook privacy. I found Zuckerberg’s comments pretty disconcerting, even more so today after an anonymous employee gave an interview to The Rumpus.

The most interesting was when the employee admitted to a master password for every account, one that used to be ‘Chuck Norris’ spelled with letters, numbers, and symbols. Now, the password only worked from inside Facebook offices, but I can’t imagine a scenario under which an employee would need to actually log in to the site as anyone else. Wouldn’t there be internal diagnostic tools for viewing that information? A database viewer perhaps?

There’s also the fact that Facebook logs all of the information pertaining to your usage. That allows it to implement handy features like remembering whose site you visit most so it appears at the top of your searches. But that’s not all that gets logged. There’s also all of the information you’ve ever entered, including the stuff that you’ve deleted.

I hate to sound like a fear monger, but I think it’s important for people to be aware of how much information is held on Facebook’s servers and how many people have access to that information. It’s more than I thought, on both accounts.

I logged into Facebook last month probably three times, for all of which I was greeted by a screen that warned of new privacy settings. I ignored the messages and went about my usual routine, rejecting friend requests from the high school acquaintances and responding to week-old messages. Then the changes showed up in all the blogs I read and I went back to look over them. It was a serious shift and, as you probably know, a move away from the privacy we’ve all held so dear (or learned to guard after pictures show up).

The weird thing is, Facebook was built on giving users more privacy, not less. It was one of the major differentiators between Facebook and MySpace, the feature most people point to when they talk about why the former is so successful compared to its counterpart. Zuckerberg talked about the change this weekend with Michael Arrington. His reasons for the change are surprising, and a little disconcerting when you realize he’s helping direct the policy changes.

Here’s a quote that might scare you: “We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.” Here’s some news, Mark, you are the social norm. If anything, Facebook is setting trends offline, not vice versa, and that will only continue as more people come to the site.

Here’s another one:

“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”

You know there are few things I want to hear less than “we just went for it” when it comes to information privacy. I can respect the philosophy behind the “beginner’s mind” strategy, but you also have to realize your multi-billion dollar valuation and the fact that you have permanently impacted the direction of the entire internet. That’s not the type of situation to just go for it because that’s what beginners might do.

If anything, the most recent changes to Facebook’s privacy settings have made me a much more discerning Facebook user. I’m much less prone to add people simply because I haven’t talked to them in a while. Honestly, I’m much less likely to keep my profile public for much longer. Sure, it can be a great way to stay in touch, but if it’s at the expense of making more and more of what I consider private information public, I’m more than willing to delete the account.

Arrington and TechCrunch have officially filed suit against Fusion Garage for the tablet formerly known as the CrunchPad. Arrington is confident in his position, and seemingly for good reason. He’s the only side we’ve seen hard evidence from so far, and it’s looking like Fusion Garage may have really screwed the pooch here.

If you’re interested in the manufacturer’s many missteps, you can check out Arrington’s latest over on TechCrunch. The short version is this: Fusion Garage is funded by a chiropractor (read: they’re broke). They don’t have money to both make the device and hire an attorney for defense of this suit. Bearing that in mind, pre-order cash is likely going to pay for an attorney, so you won’t be getting your tablet any time soon. Fusion Garage may also be looking at further lawsuits from other partners, as the company probably had to give away IP to get this thing out on time. That’s not good.

As I mentioned before, any kind of investment in this device is a waste of money. It’s already so messy I can’t imagine anyone would actually want to be involved with it.

Source: TechCrunch

The Fusion Garage webcast has come and gone and there’s not much new to report. The company is indeed moving forward with the device formerly known as the CrunchPad, now dubbed JooJoo. It’s going to cost $499 instead of the approximate $300 for the original CrunchPad and will come in just one color.

I think I’m still siding with Arrington on this one. Chandra Rathakrishnan made a serious attempt to vilify Arrington during his webcast, and he mentioned several times that Arrington had contributed nothing, but then why has so much changed? Was the color scheme Arrington’s idea? And what of the price? Why is suddenly more than $100 more expensive than rumored, even at the highest CrunchPad prices?

Rathakrishnan’s one decent point came when he was asked if he thought the device could be a success without Arrington’s marketing. He reminded us that all we had from Arrington was blog posts. It’s true, but if that’s really all that Arrington and TechCrunch had contributed I doubt there would be serious legal action underway.

Unfortunately, the one truth I can see from this is that we won’t be seeing the device under either name. I know JooJoo is supposedly going to launch this week, but I’d be shocked if Arrington let that happen. If this goes to court and Arrington wins, you can bet he’s not going back into business with these guys. If he loses, it’ll likely be after a lengthy process, and JooJoo will be too little, too late. At $500 it’s already way too expensive for what it does.

Source: Gizmodo