Facebook has been valued at a whopping $50bn, after raising $500m in investment from Goldman Sachs and a Russian financier, according to the NYTimes. The deal follows news that Facebook topped Google to be the most trafficked site in 2010, and will see Goldman Sachs create a "special purpose vehicle" for priority investors to put their money into the popular social network.
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‘social networks’ Stories
Myspace facing up to 50% workforce axe tip insiders
Myspace execs are reportedly considering axing up to 50-percent of the struggling social network's workforce, amid drastic cost-cutting measures intended to counter diminishing revenues and traffic growth. According to NetworkEffect's sources, as many as 550 employees could face redundancy should Myspace owner News Corp decide to go ahead with the plan; other strategies include selling on the social network, with both online game company Zynga and private equity buyers both tipped.
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Path 1.2 adds 10 second video sharing to “personal moment” service
Here's an odd one: Path, which launched an iPhone photo sharing app last month designed to only show your pictures to up to fifty carefully-selected friends, has added video sharing to the v1.2 update. Thing is, only clips ten seconds or shorter can be uploaded, a limit that seemingly addresses both limited mobile bandwidth and the company's ethos of "personal moment sharing".
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Foursquare iPhone update adds photos & comments; Android version imminent
Foursquare has pushed out an update to its popular iPhone app, adding photos and comments to the geo-location service. Available on iTunes today [iTunes link], the new update is apparently a response to user feedback over the past few months, and uses Apple's push-notifications to immediately update you to the newest comments.
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Facebook on the Job
When I took a look back at the original Tron movie, one thing that struck me, one thing that I hadn’t remembered since I last watched the movie so long ago, was that the encapsulating plot was really about a company that was cutting off its employees’ access to the outside world. Jeff Bridges’ character Flynn can’t get access to the corporate mainframe from outside the company. So, he enlists the help of a couple old friends who still work for Encom, Those friends are disgruntled because their access has been restricted while the company conducts a security review, trying to figure out who has been hacking into the system. It turns out, the company was right to be suspicious. Even though Flynn is vindicated by the evidence he finds, the company was right that there was a security risk.
Facebook Memories timeline gets accidental preview
Facebook has prematurely previewed an upcoming feature, with the social networking site forced to go offline as engineers scrabbled to put the "internal prototype" back in its box. Facebook Memories introduces a timeline to users' profiles, showing how many statuses were written each year and how many friends were added, along with a sprinkling of photos to illustrate those changes.
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Why TIME Got It Right
In a controversial move, TIME magazine declared Mark Zuckerberg its Person of the Year. Only TIME magazine can do something controversial by avoiding controversy. I’m speaking, of course, of the more obvious pick for Person of the Year, Julian Assange. With the WikiLeaks dump still fresh and flowing, there is certainly an argument to make that Assange had more effect on the world than Zuckerberg. But I think that Time magazine got this one right.
Facebook photo auto-tagging makes ID’ing friends easier
Facebook has added automatic face-tagging to its popular photo sharing galleries feature, with the system automatically gathering up individuals it believes to be the same in newly uploaded pictures, and allowing users to link them to a friend's profile in one easy step. The functionality is a progression of Facebook's existing face-identifier, which spotted different people in each frame, adding in suggestions as to whom the system believes is in each shot.
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Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg named TIME’s Person of the Year 2010
TIME magazine has named Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg its Person of the Year 2010, suggesting that the site which "started out as a lark" has now gone on to change "the way human beings relate to each other." The news will undoubtedly come as a disappointment to those who see Facebook's growth eroding real-world interpersonal relationships and point to the ways the site leverages its users' personal data for financial reward.
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A Cartoonish Way to Prevent Cruelty
In graduate school, I mostly studied –isms. Feminism. Marxism. Racism. I got a Master’s degree in Cultural Theory, which is sort of an intersection between philosophy and deep analysis of English literature. Mostly, I read philosophers who talked about literature and wanted to change the world. When I started my course of study, I thought I would get a PhD. I thought I would become a professor. But over the course of two years of graduate study, I realized that all we were doing was reading and talking. The authors we read were writing mostly in terms so abstract that you could hardly divine what they were talking about, let alone what they wanted to accomplish. It seemed a terrible way to change the world, talking but not doing anything. So, I left.
New Facebook profile: Switching is super-simple
We've already covered the upcoming significant redesign of Facebook's user profiles over the weekend, but if you're convinced by Mark Zuckerberg's changes you don't have to wait until early 2011 when every user is expected to have been migrated. Instead, with just a few simple steps, you can be using the new Facebook profile layout right now.
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Twitter Power and the Hobby Lobby
Yesterday an old friend posted on Facebook: “XXX dislikes craft stores (and all stores for that matter) that say, “no nothing Hannukah in here – we are a Christian store. We only celebrate Christmas.” Nice.” How old is this friend? I used to babysit her and her brother when they were kids. She still lives in our hometown, Columbia, Md. Columbia is a fantastic place to grow up. It is often rated one of the best cities in which one could live, along with neighboring Ellicott City. Columbia is a planned city, and a progressive city. It is zoned to be integrated, in terms of socio-economics, and most schools have a racial and religious mix that is far more diverse than the rest of the country. It is the sort of place I’d like to raise my own children, and the open-minded upbringing I had in Columbia certainly shaped my worldview for the rest of my life.
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