The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates communication technology including the Internet, was once credited with having the worst website in federal government.

But the agency is committed to upgrading its technology under the leadership of Microsoft veteran Steven VanRoekel. The FCC has been beefing up its developer offerings and it announced today that the new website will be built using the open source content management system Drupal.

“This decision is a significant step towards modernizing our own underlying online infrastructure — a key stage in redesigning and rebuilding FCC.gov,” VanRoekel said.

The old website, designed ten years ago, had become a sprawling mess of information due to a “Web 1.0″ mentality, VanRoekel said. The changes at the FCC are driven by the desire to engage the community and make the FCC’s data more available, officials at the agency said.

“As we think about FCC.gov reimagined, one of the things I harken back to is really thinking of “dot gov” like a “dot com where we equated citizens as both our customer and our shareholder,” VanRoekel said at the Gov 2.0 Summit two weeks ago.

He went on to talk about how the technology on the website should taken into account customer service, market innovation and agility. Apparently the agency decided that Drupal, which is known for its robust developer community, would be the best platform to encourage innovation and move the government website in a new direction.

The FCC is the latest government website to use Drupal, which already powers the White House website as well as the Department of Commerce’s Commerce.gov and the Department of Education’s Ed.gov.

“We understand that citizen shareholders deserve a government that moves quickly to deliver information, facilitate transactions, and inform and engage Americans. As we continue to reimagine what FCC.gov can — and will — be, we’re excited to do so alongside the Drupal community,” VanRoekel said.

Net neutrality has taken up a lot of headline space over the last two weeks. There was the Goggle and Verizon thing, and then something happened with the FCC and some Congress members, and the French may have been involved somehow… Admit it, your eyes are glazing over aren’t they? Yes, it’s true, net neutrality sometimes isn’t the easiest thing to wrap your head around. But the artistic folks at Online MBA Programs are here to help with 15 facts you may not have known about what neutrality on the Internet actually means.

[Source: Online MBA Programs]

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Last week, Facebook added a suite of new features that let websites like Pandora and Docs.com access some of your personal information and use it to instantly personalize your experience. Pandora, for example, will recommend streaming music stations built around artists you’ve Liked on Facebook in the past.

Most of the time this information is harmless and you shouldn’t worry too much about it being used for nefarious purposes, but if you want to err on the side of caution, you can actually opt out of the program for privacy reasons – the option is called “Instant Personalization” and it’s sitting deep inside of Facebook’s privacy settings pages.

Opting Out at Specific Sites

You can either turn Instant Personalization off entirely at Facebook, or you can opt out at individual websites on a case-by-case basis. The latter is easy; the first time you arrive a website that uses Instant Personalization, a bar will appear at the top of the page letting you know that’s what’s happening and giving you the option to either accept that or to tell it “no thanks.”

Blocking Instant Personalization For All Sites

The feature is on by default when you first arrive at a site, though, and if you’re sure you never want to use it anywhere, you can dig deep from your Facebook home page to make sure no other website can ever access your Facebook information for Instant Personalization purposes. To do that, start by clicking on “Account” in the upper-right corner of the Facebook homepage. Select “Privacy Settings” from the list that drops down below.

You’ll be presented with a list of five privacy settings pages. You can do a lot with these pages – customize who can see your profile info and news feed updates, for example – but the option we’re looking for now is right in the middle: “Applications and Websites.” Give that a click.

There it is at the bottom of this list: “Instant Personalization.” Consider clicking “Learn More” by the top item, too, though, as it explains exactly how your other privacy settings affect what information is shared with other applications and websites. Anyway, click “Edit Setting” by “Instant Personalization” at the bottom.

This last stop in the rabbit hole tells you what Instant Personalization does, and provides a lone check box at the bottom to enable or disable it. It’s on by default. Click the check box to turn it off.

There you go. It’s done! Facebook won’t share your personal information with websites for Instant Personalization again until you re-enable this feature. You can do that by going back and re-checking the box at any time, so if you decide you want the new features after all, this isn’t irreversible.

Preventing Friends From Sharing Your Info

You should be aware that friends can still sometimes share your information from their own profiles with websites even though this is turned off. This is easy to change. Just jump back one level to “Applications and Websites” and click “Edit Settings” by the second option – “What your friends can share about you” – instead of “Instant Personalization.

Here you can check and un-check boxes to specify what information your friends’ connections can share with other applications and websites. If you un-check everything here, none of your information will be shared. It’s nice to be able to choose exactly what you are and aren’t comfortable with, though.

This is the second in a series of posts by by Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg giving advice to entrepreneurs on building their young businesses. The first post, From Nothing To Something. How To Get There, is here. And make sure to read our recent posts with advice from Mint CEO Aaron Patzer on his advice to entrepreneurs as well (here and here).

The number one question you all asked after reading my last blog post about starting a business from scratch was “how do I find my co-founders?”

Great question – let’s start with a bit of self reflection:

Close your eyes and visualize your group of closest friends.

Now, think specifically about how tall (or short) they all are.

Great, now ask yourself “are all of them roughly the same height?” I’ll bet most of them are – you included.

And therein lies the problem in finding co-founders for that startup you’re dying to launch. It’s most comfortable to hang out with people like ourselves, but those are exactly the folks you probably don’t want to co-found a startup with. Seems a bit unintuitive, right? I’ll explain.

The best founding team for a startup is a group of two or three people who have synergistic – not overlapping – skills. Note that it’s also important your goals and passions be similar. If one of you wants to sell fast and the other wants to build a billion dollar business, that’ll make for pretty serious friction down the road. So too would a team where one person’s more interested in enterprise startups while the other person’s passion lies in consumer experiences. With that out of the way, however, it’s critical that you look for people with complementary skills to your own. In consumer internet, that usually means one front-end user-facing developer, one back-end server-side developer, and ultimately a business person (details will come in a later post).

The reality though, is that we tend to hang out with people who are just like us. Remember that story I told about the three business school students telling me about their tech startup, leaving me to wonder who’d actually build the product? I see that all too frequently – from business folks and techies alike. It’s just easier to hang out with people in your same classes at school, or your same group at work.

If you happen to be in school now, you’re in the most fertile place possible to meet your co-founders. Take advantage of it! How’d I meet Elaine and Sandy? Mutual friends from school. How about some other teams? Larry and Sergey from Google met at Stanford. So did Jerry and David from Yahoo!. The Plaxo founders also met in school, which is also where Mark from Facebook met his co-founders. Having trouble meeting folks you think would be good co-founders? Here are a couple ideas:

1. Join student groups relevant to your interests. If you’re a business major – go check out the Engineering Society’s monthly meeting. If you’re in the CS department, I’ll bet the business school students would kill to meet you at the next Entrepreneurship Club meeting.

2. If your school doesn’t already have a student group designed to foster collaboration between groups of students with the skills necessary to get a startup rolling, start one! BASES at Stanford is a great model to follow. It brings together students from both the undergraduate and graduate levels, across disciplines such as design, computer science and business.

Ok, so most folks reading this are probably out of school. Fortunately, there are a number of examples of successful founding teams that met outside of school. Chad and Steve from YouTube met while working at PayPal. Sean and Shawn from Napster met in an IRC channel. Cisco was a husband and wife team. It helps to be in school, but it’s not an absolute requirement. A few practical ideas applicable to everyone, in school or not:

1. Get out there and find activities that attract diverse groups of people. In Silicon Valley, rock climbing’s a current hot spot for startup folks. So is ultimate frisbee. There’s at least one weekly ultimate frisbee game I’m aware of that’s chock-full of people from the startup industry, on both the business and tech sides.

2. Ask your friends for intros to people in an area you’re trying to learn about. Chances are someone in your group of techies knows someone business oriented. The first folks you meet may not be a fit, but keep asking for referrals and you’ll get there.

3. Join / attend local organizations designed to foster introductions between folks interested in startups. SVASE or Founder Dating in Silicon Valley, First Tuesday in London and Hackers and Founders in New York all come to mind.

4. Team with co-workers at your current job or that internship you did last summer. Just make sure to not violate any non-competes, etc, in the process! Generally speaking, as long as you’re not working on a project your employer would reasonably want to own, you’re probably ok. Of course, do not use any of your employer’s resources. A great friend of mine is scheming, right now, with a co-worker on their next great startup. One’s a PM and the other’s an engineer.

I’m sure some of you are thinking “that’s all great – but I live in the middle of nowhere and none of those resources are available to me.” To be blunt, find a way to move to Silicon Valley. Other cities like New York, Boston, Seattle, LA and Austin TX also have pretty strong startup communities. However, nowhere has as many real estate agents, lawyers, accountants, landlords, employees, co-founders, mentors, and VCs all steeped in startup culture as does Silicon Valley. The ecosystem is just hard to beat. The result is that you’ll be exposed to many more people who can help you get started. In my case, I grew up in Connecticut and spent a fair amount of time in New York – all the while trying to start companies, relatively unsuccessfully. Friends in Silicon Valley kept telling me to move out there for all the reasons I mentioned above. I finally found my ticket in the form of admission to business school in the valley. Find your ticket.

The hardest part of starting from scratch is finding the right co-founders. Ideas, comparatively, are easy. You may spend three years finding your co-founders while you’ll come up with a solid idea every 3 months or so. Luckily, once you settle into a great founding team you’ll be able to execute much faster on that killer idea you all come up with – beating those ten other folks who came up with the same idea at the same time.

Remember, the ultimate goal is to create a founding team that can, within its own skill set, get a working prototype out the door. This means you need to find folks with skills that compensate for your weaknesses. Co-founding a startup is like getting into a marriage – picking the right people is critical. In later posts I’ll get more specific on how to figure out if the folks you’re meeting are the right people to work with, and also how to deal with issues like splitting equity and paying yourselves before raising funding. Feel free to follow me on Twitter to get notifications of later posts on this topic, both here and on the ="http://blog.meebo.com">Meebo Blog.

Yesterday, the Dev-Team tweeted about their concern with the release of Snow Leopard and jailbreaking. They said, “If you get both Snow Leopard & iPhone on Fri, easiest to jailbreak 1st, update to Snow 2nd Til any kinks are worked out.” However, a little later they tweeted, “Lots of tweets that redsn0w and PwnageTool work great on Snow Leopard, so *should* be kink-free Friday! Thanks twitterers!” So, if you are getting (or got) Snow Leopard today, you should be good to go.