When Microsoft walked away from its blockbuster bid for Yahoo, the media sought desperately to keep the news coming even when there wasn't much left to say. That seems to be how The Wall Street Journal came up with the notion that Microsoft had approached Facebook about an acquisition. It's not true.
Facebook, the world's second-largest social networking Web site, will add more than 40 safeguards to protect young users from sexual predators and cyberbullies, attorneys general from several states said Thursday.
Facebook, the world's second-largest social networking Web site, will add more than 40 new safeguards to protect young users from sexual predators and cyberbullies
Facebook, the world's second-largest social networking Web site, is adding more than 40 new safeguards to protect young users from sexual predators and cyberbullies, attorneys general from several states said Thursday.
Sarah Brown is unusually cautious when it comes to social networking.
The three-year-old social networking phenomenon Facebook, worth more than $15 billion by many estimates, got a good deal on going global.
Facebook, the 71-million-member social network, has attracted lots of adults during the last year as it became a global technology cause celebre. But I'm hearing more and more of these grown-up newbies questioning whether the service is really worth their time. Some find it more annoying than useful, and can't really figure out any benefit.
A Texas woman has sued Blockbuster Inc. alleging the video rental company transmitted her personal information to Facebook.com through the Web site's Beacon marketing program.
With 20,000 add-on apps and countless spam invitations, Facebook users are starting to rebel against the overload
Forget Facebook, MySpace or any other online hangout that boasts tens or hundreds of millions of people.
When Microsoft walked away from its blockbuster bid for Yahoo, the media sought desperately to keep the news coming even when there wasn't much left to say. That seems to be how The Wall Street Journal came up with the notion that Microsoft had approached Facebook about an acquisition. It's not true.
Facebook, the world's second-largest social networking Web site, will add more than 40 safeguards to protect young users from sexual predators and cyberbullies, attorneys general from several states said Thursday.
Facebook, the world's second-largest social networking Web site, will add more than 40 new safeguards to protect young users from sexual predators and cyberbullies
Facebook, the world's second-largest social networking Web site, is adding more than 40 new safeguards to protect young users from sexual predators and cyberbullies, attorneys general from several states said Thursday.
Sarah Brown is unusually cautious when it comes to social networking.
The three-year-old social networking phenomenon Facebook, worth more than $15 billion by many estimates, got a good deal on going global.
Facebook, the 71-million-member social network, has attracted lots of adults during the last year as it became a global technology cause celebre. But I'm hearing more and more of these grown-up newbies questioning whether the service is really worth their time. Some find it more annoying than useful, and can't really figure out any benefit.
A Texas woman has sued Blockbuster Inc. alleging the video rental company transmitted her personal information to Facebook.com through the Web site's Beacon marketing program.
With 20,000 add-on apps and countless spam invitations, Facebook users are starting to rebel against the overload
Forget Facebook, MySpace or any other online hangout that boasts tens or hundreds of millions of people.
Israeli defense officials say they have identified an unlikely new threat to national security -- Facebook.
Facebook fans are getting a new toy this week. With the launch of Facebook Chat, users will be able to communicate in real time with friends on the site.
Ashley Shinn didn't know she was in a relationship until asked to confirm it in a message from Facebook.
Remember where electronic mail was 15 years ago? If you didn't already have an e-mail address, you probably knew someone who did. And if you were sending and receiving e-mail, you'd probably discovered that it could be a game-changing business tool.
It's already hooked America's youth, and now Facebook is set on winning the hearts of two potentially lucrative demographics: Adults and the rest of the world.
Dear FSB: Is it wise for a small business to have a corporate homepage on Facebook? One of our employees mentioned it. Some say it's good marketing; others say it's not. What are the pros and cons of doing it?
In three days, Ashley Alexandra Dupre went from being an unknown 22-year-old aspiring musician to the fifth most-searched subject on Google because of her alleged sexual encounters with New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer.
We've all been there: the dull business conference. A half-empty room of half-asleep attendees answer their e-mail on laptops and BlackBerries, while some hapless speaker lumbers through a PowerPoint speech.
MySpace galvanizes protestors to attend mass demonstrations; 1.8 million Britons sign an online petition, leading to widespread press coverage and government embarrassment; and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are fighting it out for the Democratic nomination on Facebook.
I've never met Pete Carroll. As far as I know, we've only been in the same room once -- at a crowded press conference at the Beverly Hilton the day before Carroll's USC team faced Texas in the 2006 Rose Bowl. But this much I know about the man.
Mark Zuckerberg, 23, emerges on Forbes magazine's list of world's richest
Facebook Inc. has raided Google Inc. to hire a new chief operating officer, providing the popular online social network with more seasoned management and advertising savvy as it strives to make more money without alienating its audience
The next big thing is the integration of location-based information with social networking applications. At least that's one conclusion I took from a high-energy "social media" breakfast for 100 techies in New York this week.
A computer engineer accused of posing as a member of the Moroccan royal family on the social networking Web site, Facebook, has been sentenced to three years in prison.
Rock the Vote uses music and popular culture to get young people involved in politics, so it's probably no surprise that the group is using Facebook to reach plugged-in voters.
Moroccan authorities arrested an engineer Wednesday for allegedly stealing the identity of the king's younger brother on the social networking Web site, Facebook, the state news agency said.
Moroccan authorities arrested an engineer Wednesday for posing as the king's younger brother on the social networking Web site, Facebook, the state news agency said.
The Web used to be a place where we went to seek information. But with the rise of social networks, we're barraged with a constant stream of data, requested or not
It's not risky to be an optimist when it comes to predicting tech trends. This past year, like every other recently, was one of stunning advancements as well as further empowerment for ordinary people. Tech continues to make our lives richer, even though it also often makes us feel overwhelmed.
On a Facebook group that celebrates young women getting drunk, there's no such thing as going too far.
"The press rarely grants an autumn reprise for those it loved in the spring," once wrote the great New York Times columnist Russell Baker. How true in the case of Internet-darling-turned-reviled-evildoer Facebook.
Social networks like Facebook.com and LinkedIn.com might seem a little intimidating when you first try them. But if you build a profile and start connecting with people, you'll get in the swing.
Let's try an experiment. Like most people these days, you've probably spent too much time in front of your computer today. So, quick -- name three brands you saw in online display ads within the past 24 hours.
With social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace now in the digital dating mix, there are plenty of new chances to meet the right -- and wrong -- people online.
Expect to work harder for your money, but your job should be safe (unless you work in a vulnerable industry, like housing or autos).
Don't compare Facebook's new ad system to anything you've seen on Google, television, or any other advertising medium you can think of.
Over dinner in New Delhi last week, a European business executive who has laid down some big bets on Indian media was questioning what all the ruckus about Facebook was about.
Abhishek Nayak just turned 20 yesterday, and he spoke on a panel of young people here in Delhi at the Fortune Global Forum. He's a committed programmer who hands out a business card that shows him as vice president of a company, even though he's primarily a student. On the card is that great quote from John Lennon's Imagine: "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will live as one."
An analysis of web-surfing data suggests that Gen Y-ers would rather spend their time with Facebook than with sex
Facebook Inc. is looking to hedge funds and private equity investors for an additional $260 million in investments on top of the $240 million in funding it's already receiving from Microsoft, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Software dinosaur Microsoft paid millions for a tiny piece of trendy internet property Facebook. But the company needs something to make it hot again
With Facebook slowly creeping up on MySpace, is there room for two social networking sites?
There are many fantasies about entrepreneurial life in Northern California, but here's one extreme version: You reside in a vast and fabulous spread in the hills of Marin County. Your commute amounts to a stroll through your backyard, which offers a staggering view that extends across Mill Valley and San Francisco Bay to the city skyline in the distance.
The popular social networking Web site Facebook says it is taking new steps to protect its users from online predators.
Google is the elephant in nearly every corner of the Internet, from search and advertising to web-based e-mail, online mapping, and home-brewed video. With its share price setting new highs this fall, its market cap ($188 billion) is now large enough to buy the New York Times, the Washington Post, Gannett, and Time Warner - twice. Or Facebook many, many times over.
Last Thursday afternoon before the most hyped class at Stanford University was about to start, instructor B.J. Fogg and his four teaching assistants attempted to solve this engineering problem. How do you cram 100 students into a classroom that only seats 56? Arrange chairs at long tables near the fire exits.
I'm one of those early-adopter types, for better or for worse. I bought an IBM PC the week it went on sale in August 1981, ordered my first CD online a few years after that, and by the early 1990s was pestering everyone I knew to get an MCI Mail account. iMac, iTunes, iPod - I was right there, adopting early and often. I also was a proud and enthusiastic user of a Newton MessagePad for about a week.
A seemingly innocuous change is coming to Facebook that could pose a threat to business networking site LinkedIn: the ability to separate your work "friends" from your social ones.
Using a Facebook profile, police arrested a suspect in an attack on the Georgetown University campus.
Figuring out how to sort through personal profile pages to target ads has become a top priority for both MySpace and Facebook. But in the new California gold rush to turn valuable information that people reveal about themselves into advertising dollars, lesser-known social networking sites are getting left behind.
Been poked by anyone recently? Or maybe you've been turned into a zombie, or perhaps you've added Scrabulous to your applications?
Not a week goes by, it seems, that someone from my past doesn't invite me to join the ranks on the professional networking site LinkedIn. I get pinged by old girlfriends, former classmates and onetime colleagues. I've never felt so wanted.
For all of Facebook's recent successes, MySpace continues to thrive. That's the theme of my recent big Fortune story on the MySpace/Facebook battle, "As Facebook takes off, MySpace strikes back." Meanwhile, innumerable permutations of the seductive social networking model continue to arise, because this is increasingly the kind of Internet that users are showing, with their behavior, that they want.
More and more of us are sharing our personal details and chatting about our private lives on social networking Web sites, but what if these "chats" are not as private as we thought?
Sang-Hee Min and her college roommate met each other this July and began planning for their year together. During the summer, they chatted about shared interests, discussed ground rules for living together, and agreed on what to pack.
As MySpace hooks up with MTV (whose parent Viacom once tried to buy it) and Facebook makes the cover of Newsweek, it's clear that social networking is only getting hotter. (But couldn't Newsweek find Mark Zuckerberg anecdotes that hadn't already appeared in Fortune?)
Talk about a killer app. Two years ago Jia Shen and Lance Tokuda wrote, just for fun, a goofy Web application for MySpace that could turn anyone's photos into live-action slide shows. It succeeded - horribly. Within days of its launch, hordes of users at the then-superhot social network discovered the app, added it to their profiles, and communicated it to their friends. It spread like a case of Ebola at the Super Bowl. Within a month Shen and Tokuda had 100,000 users, and traffic was doubling every 24 hours.
Social networking Web site Facebook is working on an advertising system to allow marketers to target users with ads based on the information that people reveal about themselves on the site, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
It's 2020. You get home from work, kick off your shoes and relax -- on your very own tropical island. That night, your friends teleport over with other glamorous guests, all nipped, tucked and primped to perfection, for a hedonistic cocktail party at your five-star beach house, decked out in expensively understated chrome, crystal and fine Italian furniture.
The owners of a rival social networking Web site are trying to shut down Facebook.com, charging in a federal lawsuit that Facebook's founder stole their ideas while they were students at Harvard
A U.S. judge Wednesday gave a group of former Harvard students two weeks to finalize and back up their claim that Facebook Inc.'s founder stole their ideas to create the fast-growing social networking Web site.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg talks about the web giant's plans for expansion and clears up those IPO rumors
Facebook Inc., the fast-growing Silicon Valley social networking site, said Thursday it has acquired Internet start-up Parakey, which is run by two of the co-creators of the popular Web browser Mozilla Firefox.
Dear FSB: My partner and I started an online business selling college textbooks at a deep discount two years ago, in our first semester as students. Now we're 20 and still in school full-time. Our business is doing pretty well, but we want to take it to the next level by trying some rogue marketing. Do you have any suggestions? - Justin Tomevi, Co-Founder, halfcollegebooks.com, Philadelphia
It's been an eventful week since Facebook launched a new strategy to turn itself into a platform for applications created by outsiders. The social network has gained another million users and is now up to 25 million. And now that the company has created a new green field for developers, innovation is exploding.
Imagine that when you shopped online for a digital camera, you could see whether anyone you knew already owned it and ask them what they thought. Imagine that when you searched for a concert ticket you could learn if friends were headed to the same show. Or that you knew which sites - or what news stories - people you trust found useful and which they disliked. Or maybe you could find out where all your friends and relatives are, right now (at least those who want to be found).
Facebook may turn out to be a lot more important than any of us thought. It has just launched a major change in its strategy that will transform its role in the Internet ecosystem and could create a raft of new opportunities for companies of all sizes.
For some, it's chocolate. For others, it's coffee or cigarettes. But as this Easter approaches, some young and devout Christians are anxious to return to what they gave up for Lent: Internet sites Facebook and MySpace.
1 NETWORKED INVESTOR
Despite all its virtues, the Internet has created a raft of new threats to our children. Sexual predators and abusive pedophiles are newly empowered by the Net, and neither parents nor society have yet figured out how to respond. However bad you think the problems are, they're probably worse.
Efforts by the online search firm Yahoo Inc. to purchase the social networking site Facebook Inc. are not moving forward, according to a report published Thursday.
When I tell Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg he seems like a natural CEO, he acts insulted. I guess at 22 it's just not the way he envisions himself. But Zuckerberg is a strategic thinker. Listening to him talk, it becomes apparent that the company he co-founded is a deeply considered enterprise. It's also more important than most observers realize. That's not just because it has already amassed almost 10 million members.
Around and around the media merger merry-go-round goes. Where it stops, nobody knows.
Morgan Wields the Ax
MARK ZUCKERBERG, THE 21-YEAR-OLD Harvard dropout and founder of Facebook, the red-hot social-networking site, is sharing his plans for building a lasting business. Considering that he already runs ...
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