You’d have thought that Facebook would have learned by now. Every time it messes with privacy settings on the site, its users get angry. Not angry enough to stop using it, it would seem, but angry enough to blog and whinge.

It’s being referred to by some as Facebook’s Microsoft moment, where we all realise en mass that the site is an evil corporation.

This time around, Facebook has tweaked its privacy settings. The site claims the changes give us all more control, but in one area, the Facebook gods have revoked control, making names, profile photos, location and friend lists open to the world.

That’s right, whereas we used to be able to hide our friend lists - or make them available just to friends of friends - they were made available to the world, and (until this weekend) there was no way to hide them.

Obviously, a lot of people weren’t too keen on the world knowing who their friends are, with some saying the so-called “social graph” is the most valuable bit of data collected on Facebook.

Even big name stars were hit by this. Angelina Jolie’s tiny-yet-star-studded friend list went public, as did Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s… until it mysteriously was hidden again. And there’s now a difficult to find setting to make friend lists private…

So that’s what it takes to convince Facebook that privacy is important. They want us to allow more and more of our data and content to go public, because it’s good for developers and advertisers on the site. But they don’t want the same to be true for their data, because as famous/rich people, their privacy is so much more golden than ours.

The government has let it slip that the £12.6 billion mess that is the NHS National Programme for IT may be cut back or even scrapped entirely to save cash.

Chancellor Alistair Darling said:”[T]he NHS has quite an expensive IT system that, frankly, is not essential for the front line. That’s something we do not need to go ahead with just now.”

The NPfIT is a mess, there’s no denying that. Its goal to put records on paper and link everything up has yet to be reached, with contractors and trusts dropping out. Scrapping it and starting over — with smaller, localised projects linking to a standardised system — would likely save cash and help create something actually useful.

But suggesting, as Darling has done, that IT is not essential to front line healthcare is moronic. The best run hospitals in the world use tech to track patient samples, protect and share data, and even run tests from home.

The best IT, managed properly, will save hospitals cash and improve patient care. The problem here isn’t NHS IT, and whether IT is important to healthcare.

The problem is this project is too big and poorly managed, just like the many other IT projects this government has failed to sanely implement.

So if Darling and his pals want to find something to ditch to save this country cash, they should look to their own failings first, rather than leaving NHS healthcare in the 1960s.

Google’s searching by speaking tool has been available on BlackBerry and the iPhone for months now, but as Google makes its push into mobile with the Android OS — and rumoured Googlephone — the search giant is stressing that it’s own system runs the app the best.

At an event at Google’s London offices last night, mobile manager Hugo Barra showed off the Google voice search app and SatNav running on a Motorola Droid. And it is pretty shiny.

Rather than type your search out on tiny keys or unresponsive screen, just speak your search — Barra looked up pygmy marmosets (which look adorable) and photos of Barack Obama with the French President at the G8.

He also showed how the API lets you drop speech recognition into any app with a “line of code,” showing off how it works with Spotify.

The idea is that you can speak more quickly than you can type, so with speech recognition you can search in seconds rather than um, more seconds.

The Google Maps Navigation is also incredibly sexy, letting you have a satnav on your phone, with fantastic features like on-route searches to help you find a burger joint on the way, for example, or real time traffic data generated by other maps users.

If Barra was just trying to show how slick these apps are, he’s convinced me. I can imagine these pair of apps are the sort that after a week of using them you’ll wonder how you ever lived without them.

But what Barra failed to do was show why I have to use either system on a Google phone, one running Android. These apps work just as well on an iPhone or on a BlackBerry, too.

Indeed, his argument that the cloud is what makes all this possible hurts Android even more. Because it’s all served over the web, as long as other OSes don’t mess up the apps, it all works just as well on another phone.

This is why Apple likes its walled garden, and tries to keep apps like iTunes off rivals like the Palm Pre. To compete in the mobile space — and on handsets, if a Googlephone is indeed set to arrive next year — Google can’t depend on apps; it has to have an OS (or handset) that competes as well.

One thing about social networking sites is that no matter how many users they have — in the case of Facebook, 350 million globally — there’s always the problem of cash flow.

All those people posting data adds up in terms of server space and staff salaries. And Facebook has a lot of content going up, despite it losing its media darling crown to Twitter this year.

According to Facebook reps speaking at a meeting this morning, the site gets 200 billion page views a month, with 2.5 billion photos going online each month. Six billion minutes are spent online each day, with 3.5 pieces of content uploaded each week.

The Farmville game alone has 69 million active users — which is far more than Twitter, as one rep naughtily pointed out.

Numbers that large cease to even make sense anymore. Paying for data centres to hold all that isn’t cheap. So how does Facebook manage to not go bankrupt?

Advertising

The answer is always advertising, which is easy to pass off. Who could possibly make that sort of cash with advertising? They must be selling data (they assure us they’re not).

Now, Facebook is a private company, which means they have no requirement to tell the world how they’re doing. Apparently, they’re doing “okay.”

“We are pretty up front… Facebook is an advertising funded service… there is no more news other than to say that is working,” said UK privacy head Richard Allen, saying subscriptions weren’t planned.

So they say it’s advertising, let’s look at advertising. The main page, your homepage, features just one ad. Other pages, such as your profile, feature three.

Reach

You’ll have noticed that some days it seems like you’re seeing ads from the same company over and over again. It’s not your imagination: you are.

Facebook sells something called a “reach block” of adverts. It’s designed to reach the 11 million people (out of 23 million) that sign into the UK site each day. Any firm that buys a reach block gets the first five impressions on any users’ main page. (If you sign in six times, you’ll start seeing a fresh ad.)

Facebook compared the reach ad to that of television, noting some firms — including Vodafone — have used a reach to “warm people up” before launching more expensive television campaigns.

Indeed, 11 million people is on par with taking out an ad on Eastenders, the Facebook reps said.

On Facebook, taking out such an ad costs £53,000. That’s 11 million people, five impressions each, on a page with no other ads. With such ads, just one can run a day.

Facebook in the UK has sold out for all of December.

It adds up…

If I’m doing the maths correctly, that adds up to £1,643,000. For the month. That doesn’t count ads showing after the sixth impression, or the other three slots on every page found around the site, which are sold at varying rates depending on the type of advert.

That’s over £19 million for the year. On that one ad slot. That’s doing okay, alright, but it’s not actually that huge for the largest social networking site in the world.

But if we assume every country sells ads at the same rate per person and for the same amount — which can’t possibly be true, as the UK is one of the friendliest to social networking — then Facebook is pulling in over £25 million a month. For one ad on the main page.

Facebook has just over 900 employees. If we assume that £25 million/month is right (it’s probably high for that ad, but then we’re not including other sources of income) then the firm makes roughly £75,000,000 a quarter, or £83,330 an employee for the time period.

For contrast, the highly profitable Google made £4.38 billion last quarter on 19,665 employees, which works out to £222,730 for the quarter per employee.

So what does this highly unscientific and not at all mathematically sound attempt at analysis mean? It means Facebook is indeed doing “okay”. It means social networking sites can and will be a force to be reckoned with in online advertising. It means it’s time for Twitter to get a business plan…