The company’s future depends on finding just the right balance between the privacy expectations of its users and the quality of the social marketing data it can serve to its business partners.

For many people, Facebook is the first stop in any Web surfing session. It has developed into a highly engaging combination of online bulletin board, personal scrapbook, and group communication network. But did you ever wonder why, being all those things, Facebook is free?
Well, it really isn’t. Facebook offers its service in exchange for the right to capture …

Sometime in the next few weeks, Facebook will officially log its 500 millionth active citizen. If the website were granted terra firma, it would be the world’s third largest country by population, two-thirds bigger than the U.S. More than 1 in 4 people who browse the Internet not only have a Facebook account but have returned to the site within the past 30 days.
Just six years after Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg helped found Facebook in his dorm room as a way for Ivy League students to keep tabs on …

May has been a bad month for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who just turned 26 last Friday but spent his birthday wrestling with an uproar over Facebook’s privacy practices. The latest unwelcome gift: accusations of securities fraud from former Harvard schoolmates who say he and other Facebook executives tricked them into a supposed $65 million settlement that was actually worth far less.
Divya Narendra and brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (pictured above) contend that they hired Zuckerberg to work on their social network, ConnectU, when they were all students at …

If you’ve already searched for some Fan Page inspiration and undertaken the task of building a custom landing page for your business’s Facebook presence, you may now be in the market for some features that will further engage your fans.
A nice feature of the modern social web is that it’s modular. You can plug in and customize pre-made pieces of software (often created by other users or companies), and mix and match what works best for you without a lot of technical know-how. Facebook works the same way with …

What if everything we did was a little more fun?
Ever since Foursquare burst onto the scene with its clever badges and simplified “mayoral” achievements, people have been going gaga for game mechanics (and Gaga videos, circumstantially). Its competitors and allies, from Gowalla and Yelp to Miso, Hot Potato and my own startup, beamME, have been evangelizing the value of points, badges, levels, challenges, leaderboards and achievements as an easy and powerful way to get consumers to engage with a product or service.
This use of game mechanics outside of games—also …

There will be lots of news leaking about Facebook’s product announcements at their upcoming F8 Developer Conference in April. That’s because they’re already starting to test out a lot of the new stuff with third party developers, and once two people know a secret, it isn’t really a secret any more.
One of the new features we’ve been hearing about is the extension of Facebook Connect and the Facebook API to allow publishers to add a “Like” button to any piece of content on their site.
Sound trivial? It isn’t. This …

With over 9 million posts and comments in two days, Google Buzz (Google Buzz) has stormed the web like a swarm of locusts. An array of strong features, integration with Gmail (Gmail), and lots of press have turned Buzz into an overnight phenomenon.
If you’re like a lot of us, you’ve suddenly found yourself using your Gmail even more than you already were. Spending so much time in Gmail and Buzz though inevitably takes away from your Facebook (Facebook) and Twitter (Twitter), and who wants to sacrifice their tweeting and …

It’s been a long drought for IPOs, but venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs are hopeful that 2010 will be the year they rain down on the Valley once gain. Earlier this year, a handful of IPOs trickled out, such as OpenTable, Rackspace, and A123Systems. But what people are really waiting for is another Netscape moment—an iconic IPO which will whet investor’s appetites and open the floodgates for others to follow.
Below is our list of the top ten IPO candidates for 2010 in the technology industry (and, no, it doesn’t …

. . . . This would be a far cry from e-mails from folks in some faraway country telling me a long lost relative with the same last name has died and the money could be mine soon. All I have to do is send them some money. Clearly they don’t understand social networking, venture capital and the new marketing order at all. It’s not about the money, it’s about the network!
A few days later, I was forced to face reality. My friends and followers just weren’t doing the …

A couple of days ago, we wrote that Russian venture capital firm Digital Sky Technologies (DST) had invested around 180 million dollars in Zynga, the company behind popular Facebook games such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars.
The same group already invested $200 million in Facebook back in spring, which got them a 1.96 percent stake in the company, and now they’ve purchased another $200 million in common shares from Facebook’s employees.
According to Russian newspaper Kommersant, DST bought the shares at $14.77 per share; altogether, this investment got them another 3 …

It was Jan. 16, 1978, and the world was in transition. The Sex Pistols were on the verge of disbanding. Future Macintosh architect Jef Raskin was settling into his new job at Apple Computer Inc. And it was snowing in Chicago. A lot.
But while Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, two members of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists Exchange, were holed up during the not-so-great blizzard of 78, they werent wasting their time playing Uno or watching Logans Run. They were making history.
Just two weeks after that fateful snowstorm (though …

The Daily Mail has uncovered an orangutan at the Vienna Tiergarten Zoo that uses a modified Samsung ST 1000 digital camera to automatically post photos to Facebook.
Nonja, the 33-year-old orangutan, has more than 10,000 fans on her Facebook page, which was created on Tuesday by the zoo. The page currently boasts 20 photos taken by Nonja . . .
Read more at: Mashable
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{Photography by itshears}

A Quebec woman on long-term sick leave is fighting to have her benefits reinstated after her employer’s insurance company cut them, she says, because of photos posted on Facebook.
Nathalie Blanchard, 29, has been on leave from her job at IBM in Bromont, Que., for the last year and a half after she was diagnosed with major depression.
The Eastern Townships woman was receiving monthly sick-leave benefits from Manulife, her insurance company, but the payments dried up this fall.
When Blanchard called Manulife, the company said that “I’m available to work, because …

Just about every big brand seemingly has a Twitter presence at this point, but which are generating the most buzz? TweetedBrands provides a simple answer to the question, by looking at the brands receiving the most mentions over the past 24 hours.
Not surprisingly, Twitter tops the list, and in fact, the first 9 brands listed are all Internet or tech related products. This makes sense – you’re a lot more likely to tweet about the various devices and services you’re using throughout the day than the brand of shoes …

It’s been a good year at Facebook. Traffic to the site is up over 200%, from 40 million visitors per month at this time last year, to nearly 125 million now — and that’s just US traffic. Growth is equally impressive for active users Facebook-wide. The company started the year with 150 million active users and they’ve already blown by 300 million. Facebook is easily the most popular social network in the world, and their growth, which doesn’t show any signs of letting up, isn’t just happening in raw …

Facebook is the biggest social network in the world, so it may come as a surprise to some that up until early 2008, it didn’t offer any localized versions of the site at all. The company managed to jumpstart its international presence with an application fittingly called Translations, which took the time-consuming and costly task of translating the site and crowd-sourced it, asking the network’s millions of users to lend a hand. The process proved to be very efficient: Facebook launched a Spanish site in Feburary 2008, only a …

For a startup that was founded less than a year ago, Cloudera has seen some pretty amazing growth. Backed by an impressive list of investors and advisors and run by a team of experienced technology veterans, Cloudera commercially distributes and services Hadoop. It’s similar in theory to Red Hat’s distribution of Linux.
Hadoop is a Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous …

There’s a new landing page on Facebook that’s designed to get families involved in sharing updates, photos, and videos on the social network. The extended family group invite page, available here, lets you create a private group for your family by inviting current Facebook members and entering in the email addresses of those who have yet to join.
Is Facebook after Grandma and Grandpa now that they have mom and dad? You bet.

Creating a family group is simple. After clicking this link, you’ll notice the name of the group has …

Every time I watch Rick Sanchez on CNN or every time I get a new follow update from someone I know in real life, who 12 months ago made fun of me for being on Twitter, I question its value over time: are Twitter and other social networks destined to niche status or are they so embedded in our lives that they are now an indispensable part of our society?
To answer, we can take a look at some other community-based cultural phenomena as a way to shine a light …

The social IM client Digsby can not only connect you to your AIM and your Gtalk accounts, but log you onto Gmail, Facebook and Twitter, too. A recent release fixed its RAM-eating problem , and now it seems that all of that hard work (and RAM-fixing) is paying off. (Read more at: Mashable)
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{Image by digsby}