“SOME of the best-loved technology on the planet” is how Apple (APPL) describes its products when recruiting new employees. It’s a fair description. But the love that consumers send Apple’s way could flag if the company puts into place new advertising technology it has developed.

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Facebook has a chief privacy officer, but I doubt that the position will exist 10 years from now. That’s not because Facebook is hell-bent on stripping away privacy protections, but because the popularity of Facebook and other social-networking sites has promoted the sharing of all things personal, dissolving the line that separates the private from the public.

As the scope of sharing personal information expands from a few friends to many sundry individuals grouped together under the Facebook label of “friends,” disclosure becomes the norm and privacy becomes a quaint anachronism.

Facebook’s younger members–high school or college students, and recent graduates who came of age as Facebook got its start on campuses–appear comfortable with sharing just about anything. It’s the older members–those who could join only after it opened membership in 2006 to workplace networks, then to anyone–who are adjusting to a new value system that prizes self-expression over reticence.

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Subscribers to print newspapers have gone missing, as everyone knows. Book publishers are also wondering where readers have disappeared to.

And yet television stands out as the one old-media business with surprising resilience. Though we are spending a record amount of time online, including a record amount of time watching video, we are also watching record amounts of very old-fashioned television, according to Nielsen Media Research. Our attachment to the medium, of course, is obscured by the splintering of our attention across so many cable offerings, in addition to the major networks.

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Text messaging is a wonderful business to be in: About 2.5 trillion messages will have been sent from cellphones worldwide this year. The public assumes that the wireless carriers’ costs are far higher than they actually are, and profit margins are concealed by a heavy curtain.

Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin and the chairman of the Senate antitrust subcommittee, wanted to look behind the curtain. He was curious about the doubling of prices for text messages charged by the major American carriers from 2005 to 2008, during a time when the industry consolidated from six major companies to four.

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Ellen Spertus, a graduate student at MIT, wondered why the computer camp she had attended as a girl had a boy-girl ratio of six to one. And why were only 20 percent of computer science undergraduates at MIT female? She published a 124-page paper, “Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?” that catalogued different cultural biases that discouraged girls and women from pursuing a career in the field. The year was 1991.

Computer science has changed considerably since then. Now, there are even fewer women entering the field. Why this is so remains a matter of dispute.

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New laptops that boot up in 30 seconds? Too slow for me. Five seconds? Better, but what I want is a machine that’s ready in about a second, just like my smartphone.

I’m fully aware that expressing any impatience with a computer’s boot time invites derision. When the entire globe is engulfed in an economic crisis, measuring the seconds required to start different computers may seem the most trivial of concerns.

Still, I’m not alone. Unhappiness with boot times, which commonly run 45 to 60 seconds, is shared by many computer users, as reflected in much online discussion of the issue.

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Logging on to Gmail or other email service has become a routine of daily life, completed without a thought. What would you do, however, if you woke up tomorrow, plugged in your user name and password as you always do, but then received an unfamiliar message: “User name and password do not match”?

If you’re a Gmail user, what you’ll want to do after a few more unsuccessful, increasingly frantic attempts is to speak with a Google customer support representative, post haste. But that’s not an option. Google doesn’t offer a toll-free number and a live person to resolve the ordinary user’s problems.

Discussion forums abound with tales of woe from Gmail customers who have found themselves locked out of their account for days or even weeks.

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After scanning his textbooks and making them available to anyone to download free, a contributor at the file-sharing site thePirateBay.org composed a colorful message for “all publishers” of college textbooks, warning them that “myself and all other students are tired of getting” ripped off. All forms of print publishing must contend with the digital transition, but college textbook publishing has a particularly nasty problem on its hands. College students may be the angriest group of captive customers to be found anywhere.

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