We'd say Foursquare was Most Improved, replacing a boring image of phones with a splashy branded banner and the taglines "check-in, find your friends, unlock your city" in large type.

We'd give taste recommendation engine Hunch Most Tasteful for pivoting from a stock photo of a keyboard to a simple web of icons, and resisting the impulse to shout at users in all caps.

Carbonmade, which lets users create online portfolios, gets Cutest for its floating island of clouds and unicorns.

Check out the other redesigns of New York startups SeatGeek, GroupMe and the now Facebook-owned drop.io.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

Mr. Glocer explained to the 50 or so attendees that newspapers like The New York Times have to cut costs by concentrating on their strongest coverage. "That view that 'I am The New York Times and I do everything'—I think that's not the best way to run a newspaper," he said.

Here's how Mr. Glocer sees news in the future: "Why does The New York Times need to have 600-700 journalists? Why not 30 journalists with 30 apprentices? Does The New York Times do a good job covering sports? So-so. Do they do a good job covering business? No. How about The New York Times on Israel, FT"—that would be The Financial Times—"on Germany and France, which is really good, ESPN on sports and other smaller things coming together on a style sheet every morning?"

But would people pay for it? "People will pay for quality journalism," he said, "whether through micropayments or regular, boring subscription plans."

Mr. Glocer said his company is comfortable reinventing itself. Besides Reuters' reputation for breaking news dispatches, more than 40 percent of its revenue comes from foreign exchange and treasury trading services. Until 1970, he said, Reuters never made more than about $100 million a year. Today, it's a $13.5 billion company because they were "getting out of provisional news gathering, like stop being like the AP and other press, and realizing there was value in information from professionals in their work, whether it was bankers, lawyers and accountants and health care professionals."

According to a Forbes.com "Faces in the News" profile of Mr. Glocer, when he came on as chief executive in July 2001, he got Reuters to start tailoring new products for traders and asset managers, providing specialist information on fixed-income securities, derivatives and currency markets.

At the Meetup, he discussed Twitter, saying, "I think if you hooked up Einstein to Twitter, it'd be garbage, too." He also explained why he switched from LinkedIn to Facebook for business networking: "Every asshole who wanted a job was pestering me on LinkedIn and nobody interesting was coming to me." Mr. Glocer also emphasized the need for financial companies' to move into more transparent practices and release real-time data sets, instead of quarterly or yearly reports. "Even when it's down to press releases and Webcasts, it's really all about a bunch of people inside the walls of a company, a corporation pretending that they have some control over what gets out and a bunch of people on the other side, interpreting the official flow, and then most of the art is saying how that's bullshit," he said.

"What if we stopped this charade that people like me pretend to be in control of the timing, and to some extent, the content of my business, and instead release a real-time flow of information?"

Certainly, that will change the game for financial reporters. "I mean, what are good journalists?" he continued. "For good journalists, their job in company reporting is essentially to find out stuff that companies don't want to release outside of their normal cycles or templates, and get that information faster."

According to Mr. Grocer, the evolution of news will be a slow process. "I've met a lot of smart people in my life, and they're the ones who are eventually always right and they always know where things are going [and] they always underestimate friction in the world and how long it takes to get there."

"Since we're still human beings, living in a friction-filled world, it'll take at least 10 years for the media cycle to catch up," he said.

UPDATE: Mark Zuckerberg wrote a response to the terms of service concerns on the Facebook blog to clarify the changes. He wrote that Facebook needs a license to use the information you post on your profile to share with your friends. True. And if you delete your profile, your friend should still be able to see the messages you sent them. "We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear," he wrote.

But what about all that other information? Will it be shared outside of our networks? Well, he dances around the subject:

Consumerist points out that most of the agreement had stayed the same:

But the new version removes an important couple of lines at the end of that section:

Furthermore, the "Termination" section near the end of the TOS states:

J.F. Quackenbush at WetAsphalt.com calms the flames by noting an an important line to consider:

But others are more concerned about how this could affect our activity off Facebook. What about all those applications we use to bring in content from other sites, like Flickr and YouTube? Or even materials from our personal websites? "The license which you, as a Facebook user, grant to Facebook is very broad and it covers not just your content on Facebook but content you may have linked to from outside Facebook," explained Paul Jacobson, an attorney who specializes in social media and law, in a blog post that elaborates on Facebook's terms of service. "What the terms don't do is grant ownership but the license is so broad Facebook may as well own your content. What alarms me the most is that Facebook takes a license to the content you may only link to on Facebook and don't upload to the service. This covers photos you may have stored on Flickr, videos on Zoopy or Vimeo and more. This virtual land grab makes these terms of use a particularly invasive set of permissions."

Especially compared to other terms of service, according to New York University's digital cirriculum specialist Amanda French. She rounded up other social media networks' terms on her site, adding: "This one kills me: Facebook claims it can do whatever it wants with your content if you put a Share on Facebook link on your web page. Unbelievable–and unique, as far as I can tell. People can post links in Facebook to your content just by copying and pasting the URL, but if you want to save them a few keystrokes by putting a link or a widget on your site, Facebook claims that you’ve granted them a whole mess of rights. Count me out."

Should you delete your Facebook profile too? Maybe not. The important thing to remember about Facebook is this: They're not just there to play nice and let you share your every photo, note or status update with your friends. They are a business trying to create new money-making models with all of your information. So go ahead, have fun. But don't be fooled into thinking you can keep everything private and your content is yours and yours alone. And if you're really going to delete your profile in a huff, consider getting an internet drop from drop.io to share your info. instead.

Correction appended: J.F. Quackenbush's name was misspelled in an earlier version of this post.

Mr. Schwanbeck been in the online biz for 12 years, previously working for Lycos, Excite and AltaVista.

A couple hundred of the city's tech stars, from Facebook reps to the heads of tiny start-ups, were munching on mini lobster burgers and chicken paella in little tortilla spoons while slurping mango mint mojitos. Most were on the recently released list of New York's digital A-listers. "There's a list?" asked Mr. Armstrong, a tall, dark, dashing guy with slicked-back hair and a sharp suit. "What kind of list? Is it a good one to be on? 'Cause I've been on a lot of 'em."

This particular list was The Silicon Alley 100, the yearly roll call of the top movers and shakers in New York's tech community decided upon by Silicon Alley Insider. The digital business news site and the Founders Club, which throws swanky, invitation-only cocktail parties for the CEOs of digital start-ups and the financiers who fund them, brought together all the tech superstars to drink up and celebrate.

Whether he knew it or not, Mr. Armstrong was listed as No. 7, under Ken Lerer, new-media investor and co-founder of the Huffington Post, and above Bob Pittman, the former AOL guru who bought DailyCandy in 2003 for $3 million and sold it to Comcast in July for $125 million.

Jason Liebman, a bespectacled, wiry guy standing next to Mr. Armstrong, tried to explain to him what the party was all about. "It's definitely a good list to be on. You're probably one of the most important guys here!" he gushed. Mr. Leibman is also a Google comrade who worked at the company for four years on their YouTube, Google Video and AdSense teams. Now he's the CEO of Howcast, a site that produces and distributes how-to videos on the Web. He said parties like this allow New York's tech people to come out from behind their desks, iPhones, BlackBerries and Google Android phones to "pop our heads up a little bit." Mr. Liebman did not make the list.

Gawker's Nick Denton (No. 3) was there along with Curbed Network's Lockhart Steele (No. 33). Venture capitalists from RRE, Bain Capital and others were there, too, along with angel investors like Roger Ehrenberg (No. 86) and NYC Seed's Owen Davis (No. 76). Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV (No. 60) was sipping on some vino and David Kidder, CEO of Clickable (No. 47), was around, too. New York's young'uns, including Tumblr's David Karp (No. 80); Jordan Goldman of college review site Unigo (No. 91), who was profiled in The New York Times Magazine; and party boy Charles Forman, founder of iminlikewithyou.com and Gawker's person of interest (No. 97), were also seen mingling.

Drop.io's Sam Lessin didn't make the list, but was named as an "Up and Comer." He was settling a debate with Path101 CEO Charlie O'Donnell (No. 61) that they recently had in the comments section of Mr. O'Donnell's blog: "When we both started using dot dot dot (...) to illustrate our points, I think we were both getting angry," Mr. Lessin said.

Mr. Lessin gave us an update on drop.io, which will soon go hardware-free by joining the Amazon Cloud and will be redesigned. He also said he's working with Condé Nast to set up some private online space for them. And about all that Camp Cyprus controversy, in which he and a few of his young tech star friends and a reporter for The Wall Street Journal got a bit too much flak for making a video of themselves singing Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" at his dad's lavish home while the financial markets tumbled? "I learned so much from that about the power and movement of how things make it through the blogs." So, it was a learning experience.

One venture capitalist told me: "That kid is going to make five start-ups in New York and just be so successful. A smart guy."

Another smart guy, Scott Heiferman, co-founder and CEO of Meetup.com, is No. 10 on the Silicon Alley 100, not only for making his company one of the most successful Web 2.0 start-ups in New York but for organizing the monthly Tech Meetup, which is "still the hottest digital get-together in Silicon Alley, giving startups and tech devotees a chance to get the scoop on the latest in the Alley," according to Silicon Alley Insider.

"Well, I don't want you to think I'm just eating my own dog food and organizing the Tech Meetup," Mr. Heiferman said. Certainly not. "My whole life is Meetup.com. … People need community more than ever now," he said, referring to the current financial crisis. "They're genuinely freaking out." His top user demographic? Moms! Most are looking for babysitting.

Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson, No. 1 on the list, wasn't able to make it to the party because he was attending a family event (according to a V.C. friend). He's known to not be a fan of these types of lists and wrote on his twitter: "i don't know why bloomberg isn't #1 again. he's convinced the city to blow off term limits and let him serve again. it's FDR like." Mr. Bloomberg was the No. 1 on the Silicon Alley 100 last year.

Kevin Ryan, CEO of Alley Corp and co-founder of Silicon Alley Insider, helped choose who would be on the Silicon Alley 100 list. He said Mr. Wilson was No. 1 because "when you say venture capitalist in New York, he's the first person who comes to mind" and "he embodies the Internet. He embodies the young people. Well, not that he's young, but he is willing to try new things and new products just like a young person."

Dina Kaplan, co-founder and COO of Blip.tv, said her partner in party-planning for the Founders Club, Dan Allen of Bain Capital Ventures, brokered the deal with Mr. Ryan and Henry Blodget, Silicon Alley Insider's editor in chief, to have last night's celebration at the U.S. Open. She said the series of exclusive, floating parties (which has been hosted at the SNL studio and the IAC/InterActiveCorp building) is a way to build a better community. She wants the city off the "B-list" of tech and help the press understand that technology exists outside of Silicon Valley. It's right here in New York.

"Everyone in the room is getting drunk off the Obama Kool-Aid because they know he'll be the president who actually will empower the potential of technology," said Andrew Rasiej, founder of personaldemocracyforum.com and techPresident.com. In 2005, he ran for public advocate of New York City on a platform to bring low cost wireless Internet access to all New Yorkers. He told us last night that in his discussion with The New York Times during an endorsement meeting, it took him 45 minutes to explain to them the concept of wi-fi. "There's a lot of old hands, old money in New York," he said.

But the young ones are up and coming, for sure. At the end of the night, CNET reporter Caroline McCarthy, Mr. Karp and Mr. Forman were heading out for a Tumblr-organized Halloween party. Before he left, Mr. Forman gave us a hardy high five (and a low one for good measure) and handed us his postcard-size business card with a few snapshots of him on the front (one in which he is shirtless). On the back: "I gave you this card because I didn't feel like talking to you anymore. Just kidding! LOLZ! With a card like this, you're probably thinking, 'This guy should walk around with a crown.' Shit. That's a good idea!"

Their description of the video?

Have fun kids. At least they're not spending $440,000 of tax payers' money for an "executive retreat" at a swanky California spa. We wonder what their investors would have to say though!

“Look, if my entire life is going to be searchable and findable, I’m going to change how I live my life, or at least how I live it online,” said Mr. Lessin, a fit, bespectacled 25-year-old sitting in the coffee shop at the basement of Drop.io’s office (literary magazine n+1 is in the same building). He lives in Tribeca and commutes to Brooklyn, walking over the Brooklyn Bridge each day to his office on Jay Street. “I’m going to change the power of the Internet as a tool for communication.”

And Mr. Lessin plans to do just that with Drop.io. In a Web world increasingly deluged with public information, Mr. Lessin’s company endeavors to provide an alternative: simple, private spaces where individuals and businesses can share files—documents, pictures, music, love notes, whatever!—via the Web, but without fear of attracting millions of other eyes.

Launched in November 2007, Drop.io does not require users to submit their e-mail addresses, or to register in any way. The sharing spaces, called “drops,” are not searchable on Google or any other engine. They’re also not “networked” like Facebook or MySpace accounts. Users simply come up with a location name for their space (like drop.io/myspacehere), and “drop” in some files with a couple of clicks. They can protect the page with a password, and set how long they want the drop to exist (if you only want it to last for a day, Drop.io will automatically delete it after 24 hours).

In other words, Drop.io is the anti-network.

“We are learning from and borrowing from some of the best Web 2.0 tools out there for media sharing, and re-factoring them to allow people to share what they want, with whom they want, how they want, on the fly,” Mr. Lessin explained.

For instance: Moms can upload pictures of their kids and send the Drop.io URL and password to a close group of friends, instead of uploading them to another online service like Flickr or Facebook, where most pictures are searchable. (And who knows where your kid’s face could end up!) Co-workers can share business documents and presentations in secret. An e-mail address is automatically created for the drop, and any messages sent to the address will appear on the site’s page. You can fax documents to the space. Each drop also includes a phone number and extension. Call the number and your voice mail will automatically be converted to an MP3 and posted on the site. You can listen to it on the site, or send it out via e-mail to a few friends.

Mr. Lessin maintains and updates several “drops” with his service. One of them is a private blog with his girlfriend, a Wall Street Journal reporter. In it, they share cute stories and pictures; occasionally they each stop by to coo pet names at each other. Only he and his girlfriend know the URL and password for the blog. It’s unsearchable on the Internet and will never be “cached” by a search engine to be preserved in the seemingly bottomless Internet archive. If they decide to delete their drop, it will be gone forever.

Drop.io recently launched some new advanced services, too. During the past couple of weeks, they’ve been offering a “Paywall” to their clients, so other users have to pay a price to see their drop page. High-profile celebrities could charge fans to view their blog posts or new MP3s. Authors can ask for money to access the latest chapter in their next book. Businesses with exclusive consulting documents can charge clients.

Drop.io’s developers are also working on expanding their location service. Users can currently see where drops were made on a map. Soon they’ll be able to enable a setting so their page can only be viewed at a specific address location. For example, co-workers could look at a drop only at the office, and wouldn’t be able to access it at home or anywhere else.

So how does the money work? So far, all of these services are free as long as users take up only 100MB of space in a drop. Drop.io offers premium upgrades, allowing clients to increase the size of their sharing spaces at $10 per gigabyte per year. An upgrade to 1GB of space would be $10. If you want to keep the drop for another year, it’ll cost $20.

Twenty bucks seems like a small price to pay for a little privacy. Many other online companies offer similar file-sharing services for free, but they are using an advertising business model. They want as many people as possible to see your vacation pictures or blog posts or online documents because advertising revenue increases with higher page stats. Drop.io has no ads. They are a pay service, which some would consider a death sentence for a Web start-up. But people are willing to pay, especially small to medium-size businesses who want to share information with employees over the Internet simply and privately. At this point, said Mr. Lessin, thousands of people have paid for upgrades.

Mr. Lessin said he is fascinated by an increasingly indiscreet public who want to blog and Twitter and Facebook and Flickr their every move and allow companies to make money off their content. “The whole Web has evolved into search or social,” he said. “But that’s not all that’s out there.”

MR. LESSIN WATCHED social networking evolve from its budding stages. He grew up in Englewood, a plushy New Jersey suburb, and his father, Bob Lessin, was a well-known Wall Street mogul as vice chairman of Salomon Smith Barney. Bob Lessin was an angel investor to dozens of Web start-ups during New York’s technological heyday in the ’90s. In 1997, he invested in the Web’s first social networking site: Andrew Weinreich’s Sixdegrees.com. The site was the template for Facebook and MySpace, which would eventually become the most profitable social-networking services on the Web.

Mr. Lessin was buddies with Mark Zuckerberg and was studying social studies at Harvard when Mr. Zuckerberg launched the first versions of Facebook in 2004. Mr. Lessin kicked off several of his own Web projects while in school, including CrimsonXchange.com, an online auction platform for students to sell textbooks, tutoring services and other personal items, and Kinjunction.com, a Web site for privately connecting with family members, which launched right after he graduated.

Mr. Lessin said setting up a social-networking site like Kinjunction was difficult because he couldn’t find the perfect formula for creating a trusted social network. Creating an algorithm that automatically defines a person’s “family” seemed impossible. Many people consider their best friend part of their “family,” even more so than their distant cousin, step-sibling or even their own mother. “Networks to me are temporal,” Mr. Lessin said. “They’re always changing, the nature of the relationship is changing, it’s always in flux.” Who can say that most of their Facebook friends are true “friends”?

With Drop.io, Mr. Lessin decided to take out the guesswork. “Let’s not focus on trying to map that because we’re not going to get it right,” he explained. “Let’s let people make whatever kind of network they want. If you want to use it with your Twitter group, your Facebook, your mom,” then you can do that.

“One thing that the Internet and technology has done is that it has made it very, very simple to connect with the people that you want to. If I want my mom, I have 15 ways of getting to her,” Mr. Lessin continued. “The key is no longer where do I look or what is the information I want to send to someone; it’s how do you actually move the information effectively?” And privately.

According to a recent survey conducted by research firm iTracks (financed by Internet security and care provider Radialpoint), more than half of Americans are concerned about security threats when using social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, yet 64 percent say viruses or unlawful access to personal information do not cause them to avoid using these services. We’re addicted!

DROP.IO HAD RAISED $3.9 million in financing from RRE Ventures and DFJ Gotham, two well-respected venture capital firms. There are over a million active “drops” on the site at any time. The company has 11 staff members, most of whom are developers. Without much press beyond tech blogs and word-of-mouth, the company is already getting cold calls from small and medium-size businesses asking Drop.io to set up online space for sharing private files with employees.

But Mr. Lessin worries about the future. He summons French philosopher and sociologist Michel Foucault’s ideas about Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon as a metaphor for our online world. “We’re gonna be in trouble,” Mr. Lessin warned. “I would make the argument that the ability to have asymmetrical information to experiment or to kind of push the envelope and discover new things, is fundamentally based on the ability for people not to be public all the time.

“Technology doesn’t just empower total information,” he continued. “It can also empower quality, private information and can kind of get away from that very scary Panopticon future. I think what [Drop.io] is doing is a very important piece of how I’d like to see the world evolve, where the Internet and communication can actually be used for high-quality, private communication that’s valuable rather than public drivel.”