You may never have heard of Aaron Greenspan, CEO of Think Computer, who attended Harvard with Zuckerberg. Unlike Zuckerberg’s slacker portrayal by the Wall Street Journal, Greenspan founded Think Computer at the age of 15, and later graduated cum laude from Harvard in 2004, in just three years with a degree in Economics. With the success of Facebook.com in 2004, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard.

A few weeks ago, when Zuckerberg was facing a Facebook coup over the addition of a news feed that members called an invasion of (public) privacy, Greenspan popped up with an invitation to his newly launched college-targeted social networking site, CommonRoom.com.

The press release, issued on September 13th, waxed philosophically about the shortcomings of the greater Internet, specifically with the designers that assumed users would be trustworthy, causing a “real world” system of checks and balances to be ignored. But the gem is in release’s introduction, where the seeds of sour grapes are made evident.

“In the wake of the controversy surrounding Facebook and privacy concerns this week, Facebook’s Zucker(berg) has one more worry coming back to haunt him from his Harvard past — CommonRoom from Think Computer Corporation. In CommonRoom, software pioneer Aaron Greenspan, the creator of the original face book at Harvard (houseSYSTEM), combines his previous software projects into a site that unifies student and alumni life.”

What past is he talking about? A flashback to Harvard’s The Crimson, the college’s news organization, reveals the recent news feed revolution wasn’t the first time Zuckerberg incited a campus riot. In February 2004, Zuckerberg was better known at Harvard for a creation called “Facemash.”

From The Crimson:

In that article, Zuckerberg is said to have expressed frustration with the creation of “an official universal Harvard facebook,” so he decided to launch his own, a site he created “after about a week of coding.”

In the above passage, “House facebooks” seems to refer to a Website created by Greenspan that he called houseSYSTEM, and which Greenspan says predated Facebook.com by four months. In an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Greenspan pushes his karmic comeuppance.

Aside from subtly calling Zuckerberg a thief, Greenspan went on to advise him to take the Yahoo! money ($900 million – $1 billion offer) while he still can. His reasoning: now that Facebook is opening up and going corporate, its user base could pack it up and leave.

“You attracted the cool crowd by building a cool site, one that catered to what students wanted, not what investors wanted. It follows that if you re-align your interests, your users will re-align theirs.”

Greenspan insinuates that the $100 per user Yahoo! is willing to pay Facebook is overvalued already, considering that college students are broke and imagines that purchases beginning with a Facebook ad are rare. But he smacks Zuckerberg again, toward the end, by mocking Zuckerberg’s apparent demand for $200 per user.

The value of social networking sites has been debated since the explosion of MySpace.com, for which News Corp. paid $580 million, a price some considered much too low. But critics argue that the social networking sites are at risk of the coolness factor, with a crowd as fickle as fashion that could jump to another site just as easily.

That appears to be what Greenspan is counting on as he invites Facebook users concerned about a corporate future to join CommonRoom.

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Just before midnight local time on September 19th in Thailand, Reddit.com participant by the username of Alpha_Binary began to post information about the coup.

The military intended to overthrow Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, according to follow-up coverage by BBC Asia-Pacific. While Thaksin was in New York at the UN receiving news of the coup, Alpha_Binary posted his observations over about a three-hour period.

Those comments started with this:

Then later:

Alpha_Binary also kept his priorities straight, in wryly noting, “On an unrelated note, looks like my chemistry exam tomorrow is going to be canceled; making the first good news in several hours.”

Commenters on Reddit offered messages of support. One placed a link to a blog containing links, photos, and video of the coup taking place.

Numerous other news outlets in the region and beyond have since carried accounts of the coup and remarks from various political leaders. The immediacy of the on-the-ground commentary has proven much more compelling.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

The agreement is significant because NASA doesn’t do this very often. This marks one of their first online collaborations and it will be available both from NASA’s website and Yahoo.

Yahoo will runs ads for this offering throughout the Yahoo network of services promoting this event including their front page feature and their Yahoo News feature. This is a big deal for Yahoo because this allows them the ability to separate themselves from their SEO competitors further.

Yahoo has added another direction to their SEO that others like MSN and Google have yet to add. One would think MSN might be the leader on this with its obvious tie to MSNBC but that wouldn’t seem to be the case. Yahoo scored big on this one and even if they don’t make a lot of money on it, this will still be another notch to put in their belt.

Yahoo has been adding these types of features lately and has been working on building relationships in Hollywood. That culminated when Showtime ran the first episode of their Kirstie Alley series “Fat Actress”. This was another big coup for Yahoo is they look to expand their services.

Yahoo has always gone for the personal touch side of the SEO business. Google gets much of the headlines right now on the SEO front because they’ll search just about anywhere except under your bed. Yahoo has about the same search capacity with their search engine but they’ve got a much more personal feel to their products. Much of it can be customized much more than is currently possible with Google, MSN and others.

Yahoo will be running the NASA webcast through a Windows Media stream accessible at Yahoo’s site as well as NASA’s home page. I’d recommend checking out NASA’s Return to Flight feature with Scott Bakula. It’s a good lead in.

Coverage will begin tomorrow, as the STS 114 Space Shuttle Discovery is slated lift off tomorrow at 3:51 p.m. EDT. Right now, the shuttle is slated to fly although there is some worry at this point that thunderstorms might force a delay. They were predicting a 30% chance of the storm.

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

But while I am on the topic, I must give props to Pontiac while noting that automobile manufacturers play in a different marketing league. GM is one of less than a half dozen folks that could push this envelope.

So when the AP calls this product placement a marketing coup, I disagree. To me, a marketing coup is when one company implements a new and creative idea at just the right time before its competitors. OK, Pontiac did this, but I’ll add that a coup implies more “deft strategic move” and less “budget heft.”

An example of a million dollar idea in my eyes comes from Red Herring. The publication just invited me to join its group on LinkedIn. Why do I love this idea?

* It taps into the social networking craze, even though LinkedIn bills itself as a “professional online networking tool” (good luck with that).

* It aligns Red Herring’s dot com tech brand with a post dot com tech brand for a credibility boost of sorts. They at least get cool points for it.

* It makes good sense. Fast Company’s online community of readers is well known. It took awhile for Fast Company to build. This approach is an easy and novel way to create community around its publication. It also incentivizes subscriptions as the invite is only extended to Red Herring subscribers.

The publication claims these benefits as well:

* Accelerate your career through referrals from fellow members – for jobs, deals, partnerships, clients, service providers, or other business opportunities.

* Let others know what you have to offer fellow members and their contacts.

* Upon joining the Red Herring group on LinkedIn you will instantly add numerous members to your LinkedIn network. (161 + when I accepted).

* Your affiliation with a group may not be the only way you are related to a fellow member. Only LinkedIn can tell you whom you may already know, and how you are connected to them outside the group.

I read about Pontiac’s $7 million media relations blitz and figure the big expensive play deserves this much buzz. I see Red Herring’s idea and wish I had thought of it.

Kevin Dugan is the author of the popular Strategic Public Relations blog. Kevin is Director of Marketing Communications for FRCH Design Worldwide.

Visit Kevin’s blog: Strategic Public Relations.