I’m sitting in a talk listening to Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare (that’s a photo of Dennis during the talk above). I’m sure you’ve heard of Foursquare, but with it we check in.

In the building there are 101 other people checked in. Keep in mind this is NOT New York. It is NOT London. It is NOT San Francisco. It is freaking Omaha, Nebraska!

On stage Crowley is explaining where Foursquare came from. One slide he has is when he took a trip to Denmark he posted a map of where he’d be going onto Flickr. Within minutes he had dozens of comments from his friends giving advice of where he should go.

People ask me why I friend everyone on Foursquare (I have more than 7,000 friends, all added manaually). That is exactly why: my life has gotten much richer since everyone shares where they are located with me. Many even share their phone numbers, Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts.

This sounds like the worst thing for privacy ever, right?

It is.

But I find that we’re also finding out a new construct of what privacy means.

I really love danah boyd’s thoughts on radical transparency. She says that most people don’t want to be radically transparent like me.

But yesterday Gary Vaynerchuk said you will check in if you get free beer. Damn straight!

People are already checking in before the free beer has arrived.

And that gets to the heart of our new privacy construct: we will share our privacy +if+ we get something in return.

Most of the compelling arguments I’m hearing about Facebook is that Mark Zuckerberg has forced us to share something private WITHOUT giving us the “free beer” in return. Or, at least, Zuckerberg hasn’t explained what we are getting in return for his throwing our privacy under the bus. Let me explain.

Facebook used to have a privacy setting that would let you hide your social graph (geek talk for who your friends are) from me. Today you can no longer hide your friend graph and some other profile details, like what kind of music you like.

See, this is why people think I’m on the wrong side of the privacy problems Facebook is having. I see that there are real benefits to being radically transparent and so do many people (more than you would think).

But on the other hand, I think Zuckerberg is wrong to rip away something we thought was private and give that over to the world without properly explaining the “free beer” we’re getting in return (or, even, giving us a choice in it).

That said, Facebook is a free service that I don’t control. Neither do you. The only control we have is whether we use it or not. I’ve decided to use it, but have already gotten ahead of Zuckerberg: I’ve turned every privacy setting to “as public as possible.” If Zuckerberg wants to make Facebook as public as Twitter or as public as Foursquare, I’m cool with that, but will not use it to store anything private.

I think we need a reboot on what privacy is in this new world and when we need privacy.

And, as radically transparent as I am with tools like Foursquare and Twitter I still need privacy. I still need to know that Google won’t take my email into public. Some people have called me a hypocrite because I won’t share my Gmail password. They are right. There are some things that we need to keep private.

I interviewed Maryam (I’m her husband) the other day about how she approaches privacy on Facebook. She has a nuanced view of it. If Zuckerberg throws her privacy under the bus (she hasn’t perceived that he has, yet, you should listen to what she says about Facebook — her views match more what I’m hearing from most people, not the pundits) she’ll change her behavior.

She is clearly willing to give away some of her privacy (she doesn’t care, for instance, that you know what restaurants she’s liked on Yelp — she sees that as different than photos of our kids or discussions of our life).

The thing that Zuckerberg needs to explain is why we should believe that Facebook won’t take even more privacy away in the future. I believe Facebook HAS lost a lot of trust here and has overstepped the line. It took me a couple of weeks to get there because I live such a public life and I don’t use Facebook to store anything private (I really do wish Facebook had an even more public setting than it already has for the same reason I use Foursquare — I see that by being public my life gets better). But Zuckerberg did overstep the line by not giving us the choice and, worse yet, not giving us the free beer in exchange for throwing our privacy under the bus.

So, where do we go now? It’s clear Facebook is something different today than it was six months ago. Something a lot closer to Twitter or Google Buzz. Let it all hang out baby! And that’s cool, I’m still going to use Facebook and so is Maryam. It still is a very valuable service. But it is clear that Facebook can’t be trusted with really private data in the future. It’s not Gmail or Hotmail.

What is the reboot we all need?

1. We need to realize that putting anything onto a computer COULD become public. Even private emails COULD be dragged into public view. Jason Calacanis had an email dragged into public view that I’m sure he didn’t want put into public view. At Microsoft I learned that anything I put on a computer could end up on the front page of the New York Times (several executives had that happen). So you are always safe if you never put anything on a computer you aren’t willing to see in the New York Times.
2. We need to get over our “privacy.” Services like Foursquare show that there’s a lot of benefits over sharing your previously private info. Even Facebook now is showing me music on Pandora from my friends. That’s freaking awesome and a major side benefit of Zuckerberg throwing your privacy under the bus.
3. We need more skills to understand the impacts of sharing online. Early adopters need to explain the pros and cons of sharing better. I’ll try to do more of that in the next few weeks.
4. If Facebook wants to be trusted it must make a privacy contract with its users that will have real consequences if Zuckerberg throws it under the bus. I don’t know what that looks like. This is why the alternatives to Facebook just don’t matter either. They all could break their privacy contract with us. Even Google or Microsoft could and we all know it. So, we’re just going to have to live in this new world where privacy is a myth.

How do we have that privacy reboot?

Now, excuse me, I need to check in on Foursquare, join me there as I throw my own privacy under the bus.

It’s clear you are having some PR issues with the changes you’ve made to Facebook.

Folks like Leo Laporte deleted their accounts. Jason Calacanis is making page view budgets because of these problems. Jeff Jarvis is taunting you on Twitter. People are posting your supposedly private texts from when you were a teenager (I don’t even know if those are real, but they are getting reported as if they are).

You can ignore these issues. They will go away, especially next week when Google gets aggressive at its I/O event and releases a ton of stuff that shifts the pundits attention back to Google’s real market power.

The ones you can’t ignore?

The common feeling that we can’t trust Facebook anymore.

See, I don’t have that problem. I never +did+ trust Facebook, especially after your systems deleted my account a couple of years back. I knew then that we were buying into a system that was not trustworthy. Or, at least, not trustworthy in the way we’ve come to trust software and companies in the past.

That said, I still use Facebook. Most of the people I’ve friended over the years are still using it. And I keep putting more data into it. 400+ million people do. And more, I bet, are coming every day.

Here’s what I would do:

1. Split Facebook into two pieces: one private, one public. We already sort of have that. My private Facebook account is at http://facebook.com/robertscoble while my public one is at http://facebook.com/scobleizer
2. Make the private piece much easier to understand and setup. The New York Times actually exposed something gone very wrong at Facebook: you have too many privacy settings and too many choices. Boil them down to a few choices.
3. Put a third party in charge of “verifying” that privacy settings actually work. For instance, I’m pretty sure you are getting bashed for privacy in some areas wrongly. But the market simply doesn’t believe you on privacy, so get someone who can verify for us that when you set something to be seen only by your mom that it, indeed, is only viewable by your mom.
4. Do a better job of explaining why you are putting more and more emphasis on the public part of Facebook. I know that you get a lot of cool new features when you share your life with people, but most people don’t understand that because most people have never lived in public view before. So, SHOW THEM and show them better than you have been to date. For instance, what happens if you click “like” on a restaurant on Yelp? What does that enable? Or, what happens when you listen to music on Pandora and let your friends see that?
5. Use video to explain what Facebook is. Video is harder to read, yes, but it’s more emotional and it’s easier for you to explain and show some of these features. It’s amazing to me that you haven’t been in the public view since you’ve made these announcements. Get onto Techcrunch TV. Have lunch with Kara Swisher and Om Malik Invite me over your house. Demonstrate that you are public yourself and willing to stand up for the changes you’ve made. VentureBeat is giving you some similar advice.

Or, well, you can just ignore them all. I don’t think it will slow down Facebook at all. Most of the people I’ve talked with really don’t care about this issue or have already figured out what they are going to do about it (I handled it by changing all my privacy settings to as public as possible, others by deleting their accounts, yet others, like my wife, carefully went through the privacy settings and changed them to what they wanted).

Anyway, good luck, I’ll be in Omaha interviewing Matt Mullenweg about the future of WordPress at the Big Omaha conference and maybe I’ll ask him what his advice for you is.

Here’s a talk I gave a week ago in Tel Aviv, Israel, to the Techonomy conference where I talk about some of the things that’s changing in my world.

But last night I spoke to a bunch of parents at a private school in San Francisco.

The two audiences couldn’t be more different.

One understands Twitter and Facebook and Google Buzz in depth. One is someone afraid of it. One guy stood up last night and asked “do I need to be on Facebook to understand what my kids are doing on it?”

William Gibson wrote “the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

There have been only a few times in my lifetime where I could see just what Gibson meant and we are living in this time right now.

It’s also interesting that today Microsoft Office came out with a new version. I’ll probably buy it but I’m using Office less and less. Something that I noticed in talking with the entrepreneurs in Israel too. When I fly, though, I see most business people are still using Windows XP with Office 2000 or Office 2003. Mostly PowerPoint or Excel is what I’m seeing on planes. While most of the people I hang out with at TED or other conferences have moved onto using things like Zoho’s spreadsheets, Google Spreadsheets, or Prezi’s or SlideRocket’s presentation tools.

Folks used to make fun of those of us who were from the future as “inside Silicon Valley’s bubble.” But notice that this bubble from the future no longer is tied to a place. Tel Aviv has lots of “future” practitioners, when I visited the best Tel Aviv restaurant there was someone already using an iPad there and they don’t even have an Apple store. Sure, Silicon Valley has more than its fair share, but I’ve met people all over the world who would rather use Prezi than PowerPoint. Would rather have an iPad than a Windows 7 netbook. That would rather have a smartphone than a Series 60 Nokia phone. That would rather use Facebook than email. That would rather write a tweet than do a press release. Etc etc.

Are you from the future? Here’s some ways you might tell you are:

1. Have you copied some Javascript code for your blog? IE, do you know what it’s like to embed YouTube videos into something else, like I did with this post? If you have, you are from the future.
2. Have you written some filters on Gmail to filter your emails? Then you are from the future. (That is the single most productive thing I’ve done this year, by the way, I’ve written hundreds of filters to clean my inbox of noise which has made my email usable again).
3. Have you shared something that used to be private, like your health information, your credit card information, your drunken college photos, your baby’s birth, your sexual orientation, or something else that used to be taboo? Then you are from the future. Extra points if something like that has gotten redistributed in Techcrunch and you kept your job.
4. Have you gotten your cable upgraded or fixed just by Tweeting @comcastcares ? Then you are from the future. Extra points if your company is using tools like UserVoice, Spigit, GetSatisfaction, or Zendesk.
5. Have you started up a new Linux or Windows server from an iPad or iPhone or Android phone using a cloud service on Rackspace Cloud or other cloud hosting provider? Then you are from the future.
6. If a streaming news system like SkyGrid, My6Sense, Genieo, etc to get your news instead of looking at a news brand like the New York Times, then you are from the future.
7. If you have a Sprint 4G modem in your pocket, then you are from the future.
8. If you use a VNC app to call into your home computer from your iPhone or iPad or, even, your old-school Windows 7 netbook (I use LogMeIn on my iPad), then you are from the future.
9. If you watch TV online, then you are from the future. Extra points if you are using Boxee.
10. If you discover music on Spotify or Pandora from your Facebook friends, then you are from the future.
11. If you check in on Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, Whrrl, Fiddme, or use Google Latitude with your friends then you are from the future.
12. If you use Salesforce Chatter, SocialText, Jive, SocialCast, Box.net, or Yammer at work with your coworkers, then you are from the future.
13. If you use Skype more than you use standard old cell phone service for your voice calls, then you are from the future.
14. If you no longer are bothered by the penises on Chatroulette, then you are from the future. Extra points if you already have come up with a way to do business on it.
15. If you sign up for conferences but only go for the lunch-time networking (I’m watching the SmashSummit on Ustream right now) then you are from the future.
16. If you read Techcrunch in at least three different places (I read it on Techcruch, TechMeme, Washington Post, Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz) then you are from the future.
17. If you know how Techmeme selects news, then you are from the future. Extra points if you can pick founder Gabe Rivera out of a crowd.
18. If you have deleted your Facebook account, then you are from the future. Or, if you, like me, have gotten over Mark Zuckerberg’s throwing privacy under the bus and have just marked all your accounts as totally public because that way you know you’ll never be disappointed by something leaking into public view that you weren’t expecting to, then you are also from the future.
19. If you have hosted a live video stream on Ustream, Qik, or Justin.tv then you are from the future.
20. If you can tell at least three reasons why the New York Times iPad app sucks then you are from the future (or Steve Jobs, and we all know he’s from the future). BTW: it sucks because it’s not streaming, not complete, not easy to share, not easy to participate in.
21. If you share your vehicle’s location on Waze instead of using Google Maps, then you are from the future.
22. If you have more than five Twitter lists then you are from the future. You are even more from the future if you have listed yourself on both Listorious and Tlists.
23. If you have a Google Profile that’s filled out then you are from the future. Extra points if you have more links to more things than my Google Profile has.
24. If you have augmented your Gmail with something like Gist, Rapportive, or eTacts, then you are from the future.
25. If you feel dirty when you save a file to your local file system, then you are from the future. You are even more from the future if you are using a device, like the iPad, that makes it hard to, if not impossible, to save to the local file system. Extra points if you already think DropBox is your file system and JungleDisk is your new hard drive.
26. If you know that the number of followers on @Twitter really doesn’t mean anything, then you are from the future. Extra points if you already have implemented Twitter’s @anywhere feature on your blog.
27. If you know the difference between uploading a photo to Flickr, SmugMug, Picasa, or Facebook, and why you would use one vs. another, then you are from the future. Extra points if you pay for an account on at least two of these services.
28. If you are having discussions with your friends about how Facebook will take away Google’s air supply then you are from the future.
29. If you are already planning to buy Xbox Natal for your Christmas gift to yourself, then you are from the future. Extra points if you are going to stand in line for new Halo Reach coming too. Master Chief is definitely from the future.
30. If you think WordPress is old school and Tumblr or Posterous is the way to blog now, then you are from the future. Extra points if you can articulate what the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com are.
31. If you manage your conference schedule in Plancast, then you are from the future.
32. If you have hooked your Plancast up to Tungle.me which is managing your Google Calendar, then you really are from the future.
33. If someone has gotten mad at you because you take three minutes at the beginning of a meal to Foursquare, Gowalla, Fiddme, Tweet, or do something else on your iPhone or Android phone, then you are from the future.
34. If you know two things that are best on iPhone, RIM, Android, Palm, or Nokia, and two things that suck on each of those systems, then you are from the future. Extra points if you have one of each in your pocket.
35. If you manage multiple Twitter accounts, then you are from the future. Extra points if you can explain the differences between Hootsuite and CoTweet.
36. If you have a monitor that only displays Tweetdeck or Seesmic, then you are from the future. Extra points if you have an iPad that only displays social media apps.
37. If you use iPads to DJ your parties, then you are from the future.
38. If you already have Facebook like buttons on everything you build online, you are from the future. Extra points if you don’t, but can articulate why.

How do you know you are from the future? What are you doing that all your “normal” friends want to smack you upside the head for? If you are already living in a future I’m not, please let us know what apps you’re using.