Facebook is getting its Fourquare on, reports Nick Bilton at the New York Times.

Starting next month, the more than 400 million Facebook users could begin seeing a new kind of status update flow through their news feed: the current locations of their friends.

Facebook plans to take the wraps off a new location-based feature in late April at f8, the company’s yearly developer conference, according to several people briefed on the project, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss unannounced services.

via Facebook Will Allow Users to Share Location – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.

Apparently the Please Rob Me folks did not make an impression on Facebook. But, supposedly, this will be an opt-in feature.

Snap decision: Too much, Facebook. Too much.

These images are fake.

Update: Gizmodo fixed the post today.

Another update (March 10): Fast Company used the images today, and the author of the post, Kit Eaton, has the gall to claim that he knows they are a hoax, writing in the comments of the post: “But that’s basically the point, since it’s not *too* dissimilar to the imagery these things produce, which taps neatly into the privacy issues.” Um, yes, they are very dissimilar, and it is completely unethical to use the images without acknowledging ANYWHERE in your article that they are fake.

I am able to track my traffic and its sources here at True/Slant. Over the past month and a half, I’ve been getting steady traffic to this post: These TSA porn photos would be alarming — if they were real.

In it, I debunked some supposed TSA porn photos that the Drudge Report and Gizmodo had posted, falsely showing what could be done with images from full body scanners.

These images, at right, are not images from a TSA scanner that have been “inverted.” They are part of a hoax that both Gizmodo and the Drudge Report fell for. The photos are of a nude model, taken from a German website and Photoshopped to look like they came from a whole-body imaging machine. Read more here.

But bloggers around the Web continue to post these photos in the belief that they are real, usually linking to Gizmodo as their source. There’s been a fresh round of posts using the images thanks to the TSA’s recent decision to install the whole-body imaging scanners in 11 more airports.

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Conan O’Brien is re-emerging after the Tonight Show debacle. He’s producing a new show for NBC and recently joined Twitter to much fanfare. Within less that two weeks, he picked up half a million followers. But he was following no one.

That changed today.

O’Brien chose one of his followers at random. He decided on Sarah Killen, a.k.a. LovelyButton. She is from Michigan. Her Twitter bio says:

“I love to have smile and have fun in life. I think that anyone and anything can be forgiven and we should all just love and be.”

Says Conan:

Killen is honored, tweeting back at him: “Having a lame ass day, Russell Bigos is an idiot. And Conan O’Brien is THE SHIT.”

I’m proud to be her 3,511th follower. I hope she invites Conan to her upcoming wedding.

Update: MTV interviews Killen by webcam (in the new computer a company has bought for her as a promotional stunt).

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Justice John Roberts, the victim of a pedagogical prank

Update: David Lat and I did some further reporting and it now appears that the initial Radar post went up around 12:30 p.m. Radar’s time stamps bear little to no relation to reality. If you’re interested in the nitty, gritty what-happened-when timeline, check it out at Above the Law. If you want even more granular detail, you can email me at kashhill@trueslant.com.

It was a wild day at Above the Law yesterday. Radar Online, a gossip site that doesn’t usually touch Beltway news, announced “exclusively” that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts planned to announce his retirement “at any time.” Many of our readers sent along the link to the story, but we held back on reporting it, as it struck us as… well… insane.

A number of other sites picked up the news; such is the downside of the blogosphere where being fast is the priority. But in this case, the story was completely wrong. Radar soon retracted it. We reported sarcastically: “ATL Exclusive: John Roberts Is Still Chief Justice!” But a within an hour or so, we had a true exclusive: how the rumor got started.

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Business card for the socially-networked generation

Nowadays, if you’re not on Facebook, it’s possible you don’t actually exist. There was a time when we had to exchange phone numbers or email addresses to keep in touch with a new acquaintance. Now, we usually just head to Facebook and friend them.

Given this new social etiquette, a New Yorker has decided to make it easier for the people she meets by handing out the business card above. Lara, 29, doesn’t want just anyone friending her so she asked me to leave out her last name.

Lara is just using the cards socially. But given how often our generation skips from job to job — see my colleague’s life in business cards, at right — this wouldn’t be such a a bad idea for work purposes (depending on how well manicured your Facebook profile is).

Unfortunately, if you have a name like “John Smith,” your card is going to be far less effective.

I’ve never come across an “I’m on Facebook” business card before, so I interviewed Lara — by Facebook message, of course — about how she came up with the idea to do it:

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