Half of all registered users still log in to Facebook every day, says Sandberg in the interview. That’s 175 million people. And that doesn’t include Facebook Connect logins, only those people that visit the Facebook website.

175 million people is far more than the number of people who voted in the 2008 US presidential election (131,257,328). It’s far more than the population of Mexico (111,211,789). It is far larger than the nation with the second largest national economy on Earth, Japan(127,530,000). And it’s still growing like crazy. Facebook, of course, is not really comparable to a country, but at some point the size of a community becomes a very important feature.

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. – The Official Google Blog

Good for Google! As an American, I grew up with a pretty steady drumbeat of praise for free speech. It’s not easy for me to think of many values that resonate with me as strongly and as clearly as freedom of speech. And so I’m very happy to see Google withdrawing from their arrangement with the Chinese government. Freedom is the ultimate complementary good.

Oh, Android phones aren’t better than an iPhone, not yet; but the Nexus One and the Droid and such will push Apple to do things its closed mentality would rather not do. It will push battery technology — you need power to use a network machine all the time. It will push cellular companies to commoditize their bandwidth. Add in Google Voice, and you no longer need a separate voice plan. Having lots and lots of super-capable smartphones will push people (and then companies) to cloud data, which will make RIM unhappy but Google very happy. The list goes on.

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Google is intent in raising the average in areas it thinks are key to its future. – Why Did Google Build a Phone and a Browser?

Another way of saying this is that Google is a company that takes complementary goods seriously. When the price of the PS3 goes down, the sales for PS3 games will go up. When your browser’s javascript engine gets faster, you will be happier to use websites with more javascript. These things complement each other.

Google is the only firm I’m aware of with a position of Chief Economist, held by Hal Varian, a UC-Berkeley economist. And it’s with issues like this that we see why such a person is worth their weight in gold (probably literally). I think a lot of what makes Google the friendly company that it is is its understanding of complementary goods. In general, Google seems happy not only to help the growth of industries that it makes money from, but also complementary industries. As far as I know, Google doesn’t sell bandwidth. But they do give it away for free sometimes. Google would be happy if people were a little more used to using the web at the airport. Every additional unit of time on the web that a person spends is a win for Google, because time on the web is a complementary good to their advertising and other services.

For this reason, Google gets to be the technology industry good guy. They’re not trying to squeeze money out of every sector they look at. They do shake things up, as in mobile phones and desktop browsers. But they are great friends of the web for solid business reasons. So, maybe the industries that are fighting the web, like mobile telecoms and some media companies, have something to worry about in Google. But those of us who are also friends of the web have nothing to worry about.

At least for now. My previous post was partially about one of my worries for Google. Right now Google succeeds in large part because it has smart people like Hal Varian, LarryNSergey, and probably thousand of other folks I’ll never hear about. But corporations outlive their staff. One day Google might be run by folks with less sensitivity for a complementary goods strategy, but will still feel the pull of strong quarterly results. I think that Google will remain a company we can trust, so long as they talk the talk and walk the walk of the web. Once they start trying to push everyone into Google services and away from the rest of the web, we should worry. Which is exactly what worries me about Chrome OS.

Our first task is to attend the Facebook Developer Garage – Dallas, which is being held in fairly-central Dallas. This will be exciting, as it might be the first developer gathering for a platform I already develop on. There seems to be two tracks, technical and marketing, and I’ll be in the tech track. The business side of Facebook development seems straightforward enough, but technology can usually use additional explanation.Another fun aspect of this event will be getting a chance to see central Dallas. The DFW metro area is pretty spread out and nothing else on this trip will be eve slightly central, so spending some time near downtown should be worthwhile.

On Saturday and Sunday, we’ll be attending WordCamp Dallas 2009 at UT-Dallas. Obviously, WordPress is a platform I use, but I’m not really doing any development with it. Hopefully, this event will help me move from user to developer, even if all I manage to do is tweak a theme or something similar. Also, it seems like there are few, if any, WordCamps in Austin, so I’m hoping this event will pull in more Austin WordPressers than Kari and I. When we get back, I hope to attend some more WordPress events here in Austin and I hope to have met a few people involved in the WordPress meetups around here.

On Sunday night, as we leave Dallas, we’re going to see the Texas Rangers host the San Diego Padres in Arlington, TX. We’ve never been to this ballpark, and it is a minor obsession of ours to visit new ballparks (we’ve only visited one this season, and it was Tulsa’s minor league team’s stadium)[update: Kari pointed out to me after this was posted that we also visited the Portland, OR minor league ballpark this summer], so this is a great way to finish up the trip. This last stop, I guess, isn’t very nerdy, but at least we approach it in a very nerdy way.

Making things simple is the second biggest task in a project. The first is having a good idea.

There’s a ton of text, among other things, on the web today and that has given rise to new cultural forms in order to deal with it. Linkblogs, del.icio.us, RSS, Google Reader, etc. have all come about as guides and tools for dealing with all the content on the web and they are now just great unto themselves. I like to share what I read and comment on it. I like to read what other people had to say about things on the web. It’s a huge value to be able to read within a community. Filtering, commentary, and participation in general are all part of reading now. And the Kindle is completely cut off from all that, basically because of DRM.

That said, the Kindle is still probably the best way to read a book today. But it’s not the best way to read text today and it is probably not going to be the best way to read books someday soon, at least not unless the Kindle becomes radically different. I can’t wait for the day when I can read books through some sort of a general-reader version of O’Reilly Safari on an iPhone-like Mac Tablet. I don’t mind paying for content, but I do mind being cut off from the web and community.