Facebook blocks accounts with surname Chutia

The All Assam Chutia Students' Union (Aacsu) on Saturday raised serious concern against a social networking site blocking the accounts of thousands of Chutia community subscribers believing the accounts to be fake and fabricated. Chutia, pronounced Sutiya, is a community in Assam while the word is a commonly-used derogatory term in Hindi.

Addressing a press conferrence in Jorhat, Aacsu general secretary Jyotiprasad Chutia said: "'Facebook has blocked the accounts of all the subscribers belonging to the Chutia community of Assam thinking the names are false and fabricated. For Chutia being an abusive word in the Hindi language, Facebook authorities thought that the account holders are fake and fabricated. But, they are still unknown to the fact that Chutia is an ethnic tribe of Assam which has a rich historical background in the state history.

The students' organization also decided to burn an effigy of the social networking site in the five upper Assam districts of Tinsukia, Dibrugarh, Sivasagar, Jorhat and Golaghat on Monday and demanded public apology from the social networking website for their action.

''We are very unhappy with authority as they have even failed to verify the matter seriously before taking a step like blocking thousands of our accounts. We think it may be a deep-rooted conspiracy against our community and so we warn them to abstain from such acts in the future. They even failed to verify the truth when they blocked the accounts of some prominent personalities and popular artists like Krishnamoni Chutia, who belongs to our community. We protested this negligence and demanded them to reactivate our accounts immediately,'" he said. He added that there is also some other condemnable instance in the state where the word Chutia is being used as a slang word.

The organization has announced they will stage a sit in demonstration in Guwahati to pressure the government to fulfill their 26-point charter of demands. ''We have decided to stage a sit in protest at Last gate on March 15 to push our 26-point charter of demands that includes tribal status and reservation for the Chutia community in educational institutions and preservation of historic monuments of the Chutia dynasty.

Continue reading →

Facebook Users Judge Friends by Photos, Not by Profile

It turns out a picture really is worth a thousand words, especially when it comes to your profile picture on Facebook. That is the finding of new research which looked at how people formed opinions of others on the popular social networking website. According to the research, most people formed impressions of others after seeing their profile picture, without ever reading any of the text contained in their profile.

"Photos seem to be the primary way we make impressions of people on social networking sites," said Brandon Van Der Heide, lead author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University. "If your profile photo fits what they expect, observers may be unlikely to look very closely at the rest of your profile – they have already decided how they feel about you."

To test this, Van Der Heide, along with Jonathan D’Angelo and Erin Schumaker, graduate students in communication at Ohio State, had students view Facebook profiles that included a photo and an "about me" section. The students looking at these profiles were then asked to rate how extroverted they thought a person was, on a scale of one to seven. The researchers found that people with photos showing them with friends were rated as being extroverted, even if accompanying text in the profile suggested otherwise.

A major exception, however, came when photos on profiles that showed something out of the ordinary.
It turns out a picture really is worth a thousand words, especially when it comes to your profile picture on Facebook. That is the finding of new research which looked at how people formed opinions of others on the popular social networking website. According to the research, most people formed impressions of others after seeing their profile picture, without ever reading any of the text contained in their profile.

"Photos seem to be the primary way we make impressions of people on social networking sites," said Brandon Van Der Heide, lead author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University. "If your profile photo fits what they expect, observers may be unlikely to look very closely at the rest of your profile – they have already decided how they feel about you."

To test this, Van Der Heide, along with Jonathan D’Angelo and Erin Schumaker, graduate students in communication at Ohio State, had students view Facebook profiles that included a photo and an "about me" section. The students looking at these profiles were then asked to rate how extroverted they thought a person was, on a scale of one to seven. The researchers found that people with photos showing them with friends were rated as being extroverted, even if accompanying text in the profile suggested otherwise.

A major exception, however, came when photos on profiles that showed something out of the ordinary.

"People will accept a positive photo of you as showing how you really are, but if the photo is odd or negative in any way, people want to find out more before forming an impression," said Van Der Heide. "If your photo is not quite normal – either positively or negatively – people are going to pay a lot more attention to what you wrote."

Van Der Heide attributed this to the fact that people are drawn to the unknown. Despite their unique nature, however, the photos still seemed to be a deciding factor for many people when forming impressions about others.

"People were still seen as introverted, because of their photo showing them alone on the park bench," said Van Der Heide. "But they got a little bump up in their extroversion rating because of their profile text suggesting they were extroverted."

While this news was based on Facebook, the results translate past Facebook. According to Van Der Heide, the results can be applied to all other social networking websites. However, an interesting development comes when looking at how job applicants can be judged by their profile picture. With that in mind, job seekers must know that profile pictures— particularly abnormal ones— will bring more attention to their profiles.

"If the photograph fits that image, people have little reason to question his or her judgments about this person’s characteristics," Van Der Heide said.

Continue reading →

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes buys the New Republic magazine

Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook and coordinator of Barack Obama's online efforts during the 2008 presidential election, is entering the "old media" fray as publisher and editor-in-chief of the New Republic, the publication announced Friday.

Initial response? Journalists who do not write for the New Republic are seething with envy, and wonder if perhaps another Silicon Valley millionaire/billionaire would like to come and inject an infusion of new-media money into their publication too.

But it's not just the money, it's also what Hughes is saying about the state of journalism today that is drawing attention. After helping Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskowitz start Facebook in 2004, Hughes joined Obama's presidential campaign in 2007.

In a letter to readers of the New Republic, the 28-year-old Hughes says that chasing Web traffic is a mistake and implies that he really believes there is still a hunger for long-form content.

"It seems that today too many media institutions chase superficial metrics of online virality at the expense of investing in rigorous reporting and analysis of the most important stories of our time," he writes. "When few people are investing in media institutions with such bold aims as 'enlightenment to the problems of the nation,' I believe we must."

In a media blitz Friday (a story in the New York Times, an interview on NPR) Hughes also added to another journalistic dream -- that as soon as a critical mass of people have a tablet in front of them, there will suddenly be demand for 3,000-word and even 5,000-word stories again.

Hughes tells NPR's Steve Inskeep, "What's really interesting is the introduction of the tablet -- not just the iPad, but the Nook and the Kindle. While they aren't going to solve all of our problem, I do think they make it easier for people to pause, linger, read and really process very important ideas."

Even better, with Facebook money in his pocket, Hughes doesn't seem to care if the New Republic is ever profitable.

When the New York Times asked Hughes how he would make money for a magazine that has long been in the red, Hughes replied, "Profit per se is not my motive. The reason I'm getting involved here is that I believe in the type of vigorous contextual journalism that we -- we in general as a society -- need."

Continue reading →

Facebook Server Goes Down in Europe‎

Facebook was unavailable for a number of users mostly across Europe on Wednesday due to "technical difficulties".

Users reported problems accessing Facebook.com in many countries, including the UK, for about two hours.

The social network's smartphone and tablet apps were also affected, users on Twitter reported.

Facebook apologised for the incident and said the issue was now resolved.

"Today we experienced technical difficulties causing the site to be unavailable for a number of users in Europe," the company said in a statement.

"The issue has been resolved and everyone should now have access to Facebook. We apologise for any inconvenience."

More isolated accounts of inaccessibility were posted by users in further afield places such as Pakistan and South Korea.

The site has about 850 million users worldwide and many took to Twitter to share information about the down time, with #facebookdown quickly becoming a trending topic on the microblogging site.

Most took a humorous view, with user @Purple_Cow tweeting: "#Facebook is #down, expect a surge in productivity in offices everywhere today."

However, some website owners who make use of the Facebook Connect service - which allows people to log into external sites by using their Facebook account - were left frustrated by the technical issues.

"Facebook two hours down time this morning may make us rethink our login strategy," remarked Tariq Krim, founder of cloud-based service Jolicloud and news aggregator Netvibes.

Continue reading →

Facebook under criticisms over sharing users' data with moderators

Social networking website Facebook has been criticized for employing content moderators in the developing world and allowing them to access people's personal information, The Telegraph reported Saturday.

Facebook responded saying: "No user information beyond the content in question and the source of the report is shared."

However, new evidence seen by the newspaper shows that these moderators, who have to deal with the distressing images and messages every day, are able to see the names of the person who uploaded the "offensive" content, the subject of the image or person tagged in a photo, in addition to the person who has reported the content.

Former Facebook moderator, 21 year-old Amine Derkaoui from Morocco, has shown The Telegraph several screenshots of what these outsourced workers see when deciding if a piece of content is suitable to be on the site.

Security experts are concerned about the amount of personal information Facebook is allowing these poorly paid third-party workers in the developing world access to.

Graham Cluley, of the British internet security firm Sophos, said: "When people report content on Facebook, I don't think they expect all of their details to end up in India, with someone who doesn't directly work for Facebook... By sharing information about a Facebook account holder, there is obviously the potential for abuse and blackmail."

Continue reading →

British student gets 8 months jail for hacking Facebook

A British student who stole sensitive information from Facebook’s internal network was sentenced to eight months in prison Friday in what the prosecutor said was the gravest case of social media hacking to be brought before the country’s courts.

Prosecutor Sandip Patel said that Glenn Mangham, 26, had hacked into the social networking giant’s computers from his bedroom in the northern England city of York and stole what Patel described as “invaluable” intellectual property.

26-year-old Glenn Mangham admitted accessing the account of a holidaying Facebook employee in June 2011, prompting fears in the US that the company was had fallen victim to industrial espionage.

Mangham claimed he had previously assisted Yahoo and was hoping to do the same for Facebook.

He told Southwark crown court his actions were "to identify vulnerabilities in the system so I could compile a report that I could then bundle over to Facebook and show them what was wrong with their system."

“He acted with determination, undoubted ingenuity and it was sophisticated, it was calculating,” Patel told London’s Southwark Crown Court ahead of sentencing Friday. He added later: “This represents the most extensive and grave incident of social media hacking to be brought before the British courts.”

It was not immediately clear exactly what information Mangham stole, although police said that he didn’t manage to compromise any personal user data. Scotland Yard said in a statement that the breach had occurred “over a short period of time” in April of last year but did not divulge precisely how he managed to break into the computers.

The statement said that Facebook Inc. discovered the breach in May and alerted the FBI, who traced the source of the attack back to Britain. Scotland Yard’s e-crimes unit raided Mangham’s home on June 2.

The software development student pleaded guilty on Dec. 13. He had argued that he was merely trying to show the Palo Alto, California-based company how to improve its security, but Judge Alistair McCreath said that Mangham’s actions had “very serious potential consequences” which could have been “utterly disastrous” for Facebook.

“You and others who are tempted to act as you did really must understand how serious this is,” McCreath said.

Facebook said in a statement that it applauded police and prosecutors’ efforts in the case, adding, “we take any attempt to gain unauthorized access to our network very seriously.”

This shows how the security measures of Facebook are thin still. We personally request users not upload any kind of their most private photos/videos in Facebook till they improve their security.

Continue reading →

Saavn ties up with Facebook to serve Indian music

Just like Spotify brings music to Facebook users in the U.S, and certain other countries (hint: not India), Saavn, the music streaming radio service is tying up with Facebook to bring Bollywood music, Indian music and regional South Asian music to the social network.

According to TechCrunch, the integration began in December and has already brought more than 7,00,000 new Facebook users to the Saavn network. Saavn license music from over 200 providers, and have more than a million songs licensed. The service is free and makes its money through targeted display and rich media ad units.There is also a premium version, for which users pay and they can use the service offline.

Saavn stands for South Asian Audio Video Network and is currently available for the web as well as iOS and Android-based mobile devices. The service allows users to stream music online and create and share playlists. Users can also create radio stations. Like Pandora, where the service delivers music based on your preferences, with Saavn, you enter a song you like, in the beginning, and all the songs streamed to you are based on algorithmic similarities to your originally chosen song.

Like Spotify, Saavn allows Facebook users to post the music they're listening to, as well as see and listen to what their friends are listening to. Saavn posts to users' Facebook Timelines, Tickers as well as Newsfeeds. Unlike Spotify, which is currently only available in certain countries, Saavn is available, globally. Users currently represent 219 countries.

Continue reading →

World famous sling game Angry Birds - now officially launched in Facebook

The popular game AngryBirds that involves hitting green pigs with a sling shot officially launched on Facebook Tuesday.

The new, browser- based version of Angry Birds comes with several new features.
The Facebook app is similar to the original mobile version, with the addition of social components, brand new power-ups, and exclusive new levels. The added social aspect allows players to compete with their Facebook friends for gold, silver, and bronze crowns in any level. Players can also brag about their scores on the social network and give their Facebook friends "mystery gifts" of power-ups.

The Facebook version includes four new power-ups, including "sling scope" (for better targeting), "king sling" (for more power and velocity), "super seeds" (to supersize your bird, turning it into a "pig popping giant"), and "birdquake" (to shake the battlefield and bring down pigs' defenses). Besides being gifted with power-ups, players can earn them through game play or purchase them.

Rovio said it is lining up even more features and gameplay for the Facebook version of the game in the coming weeks.
"This launch is just the beginning for Angry Birds on Facebook," Petri Järvilehto, Rovio's senior vice president of game publishing, said in a statement.
The mobile version of Angry Birds has garnered more than 700 million downloads to date, making it one of the most popular games in history.

Continue reading →

Google, Facebook,Yahoo face possible forex violation probe in India says report

The Wall Street Journal has reported that India's federal finance ministry, which tracks foreign exchange transactions and money laundering activities, have sent notices to the local branches of Google and Yahoo, according to an unnamed senior official. The Web companies are being investigated for potential foreign exchange violations, the source added.

A Google India spokesperson pointed out that it had not received the notice and was not able to comment on specific details. Yahoo India declined to comment, said the report.

The Google spokesperson also told WSJ: "We have an obligation to our shareholders to set up a tax efficient structure and our present structure is compliant with the tax rules in all the countries where we operate...We make a very substantial contribution to local and national taxation and provide employment for close to 2,000 people in India."

Continue reading →

Hot Salaries of Top Facebook Employees

Facebook's top executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, are eligible for twice-a-year bonuses of up to 45 per cent of their base salaries and other earnings, according to a regulatory filing.

Facebook Inc said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it will pay Zuckerberg, 27, a base salary of $500,000 per year. Zuckerberg's 45 per cent target bonus will be based on his performance.

Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg will receive a base salary of $300,000. Her target bonus is also 45 per cent.

David Ebersman will continue to serve as chief financial officer and he will get a base salary of $300,000.

Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's vice president of engineering, will receive a base salary of $275,000. Both he and Ebersman have a target bonus of 45 per cent.

That said, the bulk of the windfall Zuckerberg and others will earn will be in the form of Facebook stock they own. The company said last week it plans to raise $5 billion in its IPO. If all goes as planned, Facebook could be worth as much as $100 billion.

Another executive, Vice President and General Counsel Theodore Ullyot, will receive a base salary of $275,000, according to the filing. He will also get a retention bonus of $400,000 per year for five years, as well as restricted stock and stock options.

Continue reading →

Happy BirthDay FB - It's Celebration Time for Facebook - Facebook turns Eight

Today marks the eighth anniversary since the social network first launched at Harvard University in Mark Zuckberg's dorm room on February 4, 2004.

After Google, Facebook is the most visited site in the world and may reach as many as 1 billion members by August, notes Mashable.

On February 1, the company filed a Form S-1 with the SEC in preparation for an IPO worth $5 billion. Some speculate that once Facebook begins trading publicly, it could be valued as high as $100 billion.

According to Facebook's S-1, the company pulled in a whopping $1 billion in net profit on $3.7 billion in revenue in 2011. But much of Facebook's success has come from building a better user experience and resisting the temptation to make fast money. Indeed, the S-1 featured a section titled "The Hacker Way," a declaration by Mark Zuckerberg, who wrote that the company's mantra has long been to focus on delivering features first and improving later.

WIth over 800 million members worldwide, it's pretty amazing how Facebook has grown and changed our lives over the years.

It now seems almost impossible to imagine life without witty status updates, friend requests, relationship statuses or photo tags.

Users became even more attached to the site after the company rolled out interactive features like chat, the timeline and the subscription button.

Some might even say the site resembles a digital resume, especially since now you can turn your timeline into business cards.

Even more notable is how Facebook expanded internationally. Available in over 70 languages, 80% of the company's monthly users are from outside the U.S. and Canada.

Happy Birthday, Facebook.

Continue reading →

Facebook users in India have doubled in last one year

Facebook finds India a major growth market, where the number of users have more than doubled in the past one year, as against near-zero penetration in the neighbouring China.

For Facebook, looking to raise $5 billion through initial share sale, India is a key source for future growth.

The growth of 132 per cent in India has been higher than many other countries, including home market in US.

"We have achieved varying levels of penetration within the population of Internet users in different countries," Facebook has said, while noting that its penetration rate in India was estimated to be 20-30 per cent.

"... in China, where Facebook access is restricted, we have near zero penetration. We continue to invest in growing our user base, particularly in markets where we are relatively less penetrated," according to Facebook's documents for IPO filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission ( SEC).

Facebook monitors its user base through the number of Monthly Active Users (MAUs), among other metrics. An MAU is a registered Facebook user who logs in and visits Facebook, shares content or indulges in other activities in the last 30 days as of the date of measurement.

"As of December 31, 2011, we had 845 million MAUs, an increase of 39 per cent from December 31, 2010," it noted.

"We experienced growth across different geographies, with users in Brazil and India representing a key source of growth," Facebook said.

"... we had 46 million MAUs in India as of December 31, 2011, an increase of 132 per cent from the prior year," Facebook said. It noted that growth in the US was 16 per cent and 268 per cent in Brazil for the same period.

Facebook had 161 million MAUs in the US and 37 million in Brazil as on December 31, 2011.

According to the social networking major, it faces competition from Internet giant Google's social media platform Orkut in India, among other rivals in different countries.

Listing out its strategy, Facebook said it would "continue to focus on growing our user base across all geographies, including relatively less-penetrated, large markets such as Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, and South Korea".

It added, "We compete broadly with Google's social networking offerings, including Google+, and also with other, largely regional, social networks that have strong positions in particular countries, including Cyworld in Korea, Mixi in Japan, Orkut (owned by Google) in Brazil and India..."

Facebook has operation teams to provide support for users, developers, and advertisers in four regional centres, including one at Hyderabad in India.

It is planning to list shares on the New York Stock Exchange after its Initial Public Offer (IPO), which could value the company as high as $100 billion.

Continue reading →

Facebook all set to file for $5 billion IPO today - IFR

Facebook is expected to submit paperwork to regulators on Wednesday morning for a $5 billion initial public offering and has selected Morgan Stanley and four other bookrunners to handle the mega-IPO, sources close to the deal told IFR.

The company founded by Mark Zuckerberg in a Harvard dorm room in 2004 picked Morgan Stanley to take the coveted "lead left" role in what is expected to be the largest IPO ever to emerge from Silicon Valley.

The other four bookrunners are Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital and JP Morgan, although the underwriting syndicate could be expanded later, IFR cited the sources as saying.

Facebook declined to comment. "Lead left" refers to where the top underwriter's name will appear on the IPO prospectus.

Morgan Stanley's experience in arranging major Internet IPOs - including those of Groupon and Zynga - helped it clinch a pivotal role after an unusually secretive selection process, IFR reported.

Final pricing would not be set for several months, during which the size of the IPO could be increased should investor demand warrant it, IFR added.

The prospective IPO - expected to be one of the largest U.S. market debuts in history - has whipped up a frenzy of investor and media speculation this month, buoying shares in social media peers from RenRen to LinkedIn and igniting fierce competition on Wall Street.

The IPO - a prized trophy for any investment bank - likely set a new standard for how low its arrangers are willing to go on advisory fees to win big business, analysts say.

Continue reading →

Google joins Facebook and Microsoft to fight Phishing

On Monday, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and eleven others outfits announced they had formed a new alliance to combat phishing — a way of fooling email and web users into providing sensitive information, including credit card numbers. The alliance is known as Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance, DMARC for short, and the aim of this sprawling alliance is to lay down new email standards that help stop the nefarious practice.

“One of the worst experiences for a user is being phished,” Adam Dawes, a Google product manager and DMARC representative, tells Wired. “The best way to protect them is to make sure the email never reaches the spam folder at all.”

Phishing is a relatively simple trick. Often, the spammer spoofs the data in the email message so it really looks like it came from a legitimate sender. There’s usually a way to figure out where the message really came from, but it can be hard for the average Joe to spot.

Today, as Dawes points out, phishing messages are often caught by an email client’s spam filters. But even as they check out their spam folders, many users can’t help but open on a message than says its from PayPal. Before they know it, someone has phished their credit card number. With DMARC, the idea is to get the email companies working behind the scenes to prevent phishing emails from ever hitting your inbox or spam folder.

About eighteen months ago, PayPal began working directly with Google and Yahoo to set standards for Gmail and Yahoo! Mail that would prevent fake PayPal messages from hitting a user’s inbox. According to Brett McDowell, one of PayPal’s security managers and now chairman of DMARC, the three companies were blocking over 200,000 fake PayPal messages each day.

Eventually, PayPal, Google, and Yahoo! started asking other outfits to get involved. Behind the scenes, new names began using what would become the DMARC protocols, and as more and more companies used the protocols, engineers noticed new flaws — and fixed them. Mike Adkins, a Facebook messaging engineer, says that Monday’s news isn’t a “Coming soon” announcement. “You’ve been protected by DMARC for a while,” he says.

The DMARC protocols are based on existing technologies, including the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). Both are common mail security protocols. SPF verifies the IP address of the email’s sender, while DKIM vets the structure of the email’s content, comparing it to encoded information coming from the sender.

DMARC is hardly the only cross-industry effort to battle phishing. A global non-profit called The Anti-Phishing Working Group encourages businesses to share the latest information about phishing tactics and techniques. Paul Ferguson, a senior threat researcher at anti-virus developer Trend Micro, tells Wired he supports any collaboration that fight malicious software and phishing — up to a point. “The only caution that I would have is that there are too many of these kinds of these of efforts, they start working against each other,” he says. Even inside a single company, he continues, you might have the marketing department backing one anti-phishing group, while the research department backs another.

PayPal’s McDowell reiterates that the goal of DMARC — at least for the moment — is to defend legitimate domains, not to address what’s sometimes called “typo-phishing,” where scammers use something that looks like a common domain but is actually a slightly different spelling.

“Domain-based phishing cannot happen when both parties deploy DMARC,” he says.

Other companies involved in the group include American Greetings Corp, LinkedIn Corp and Yahoo as well as privately held Agari, Cloudmark, eCert, Return Path and the Trusted Domain Project.

IDC security analyst Michael Versace said that the approach recommended by the group appeared to be effective and inexpensive to implement.

Yet he said that the industry should keep developing new technologies to fight spammers because he expects that cyber criminals will eventually figure out how to circumvent the DMARC protections.

Continue reading →

Facebook may file IPO next week reports Wall Street Journal

Facebook may file papers for an initial public offering next week that would value the social network at up to $100 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

The newspaper, citing people familiar with the matter, said Facebook could file IPO papers with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as early as Wednesday but the "timing is still being discussed."

It said the Menlo Park, California-based social networking giant is looking at a valuation of $75 billion to $100 billion and is close to picking Morgan Stanley as the lead underwriter for the stock offering.

The Journal quoted its sources as saying that Facebook's IPO could raise as much as $10 billion, making it one of the largest ever.

With a deal size of $10 billion, Facebook would slip into sixth place on the list of largest US IPOs between AT&T Wireless Group ($10.62 billion) and Kraft Foods ($8.68 billion), according to Renaissance Capital.

A market capitalization of $100 billion would put Facebook on a par with McDonald's ($101 billion), well ahead of Boeing ($56 billion) but behind Apple ($415 billion) and another Internet giant, Google ($186 billion).

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has deflected IPO talk for years, saying he is focused on building the company and not on going public.

But Zuckerberg, who co-founded Facebook in his Harvard University dorm room nine years ago and has seen it grow to more than 800 million members, recently seemed to bow to the inevitability of selling stock to the public.

In an interview with Charlie Rose of PBS television, Zuckerberg said an IPO was "not something I spend a lot of time on a day-to-day basis thinking about."

But, he added, "a big part of being a technology company is getting the best engineers and designers and talented people around the world.

"And one of the ways that you can do that is you compensate people with equity or options," Zuckerberg said. "At some point we're going to make that equity worth something publicly and liquidly."

Facebook's current annual revenue, mostly from online advertising, is estimated to be around $5 billion.

Continue reading →

Facebook jinxing couples - accounts for one-third of Divorces in the world.

Social networking Giant Facebook has been blamed for one-third of divorces across the world, according to a law firm.

Facebook is increasingly being used as a source of evidence in divorce cases, the Daily Mail reported citing law firm Divorce-Online.

The firm said it has seen a 50 percent jump in the number of "behaviour-based" divorce petitions that contained the word "Facebook" over the past two years.

At least 33 percent of the 5,000 petitions filed with the firm in the past year mentioned the website.

"Facebook has become the primary method for communicating with friends for many people. People contact ex-partners and the messages start as innocent, but lead to trouble. If someone wants to have an affair or flirt with the opposite sex then it's the easiest place to do it," said Mark Keenan, managing director of Divorce-Online.

The most common reasons for Facebook causing problems were a spouse finding flirty messages, photos of partners at a party they did not know about or with someone they should not have been with.

Anne-Marie Hutchinson, at Dawson Cornwell Solicitors, said: "If you are keeping things from your partner, Facebook makes it so much easier for them to find out."

Keenan said he has warned his clients to keep off Facebook while going through divorce proceedings.

"People need to be careful what they put on Facebook as the courts are now seeing a lot more evidence being introduced from people's walls and posts in disputes over finances and children," he said.

Continue reading →

Facebook Chat - Use somebody's Profile pic as emoticon

Guys, here is a facebook trick for FB chat fans. Ever felt like displaying the photogrpah of somebody instead of typing their name ??? Here you see a superb trick.All you have to do is:

1. Go to the profile of the event,person or page.
2. Check out the ProfileID, name or EventID in the URL of the page.
3. Now type the ID or name in between brackets like, [[name]],[[ID]].. 
4. There You Go ! ! :D :D 

• Badass – (Chuck Norris) [[46637413257]]
• Eloquence - [[WilliamShakespeare1]]
• Pirate - [[CaptainJackSparrow]]
• President, leadership - [[barackobama]]
• Bro - [[DJPAULYD]]
• Male attractiveness - (Ryan Gosling) [[246631252031491]]
• Boyishness –  [[JustinBieber]]
• Relaxation - [[BobMarley]]
• Condescension, judgment - [[simoncowell]]
• Adventure, auto theft – [[VinDiesel]]
• Brilliance, controversial brilliance – [[Zuck]]
• Loudmouth - [[theuncrunched]]
• Greed - [[DonaldTrump]]
• Drunk – (David Hasselhoff) [[123670240998921]]
• Santa Claus - [[TheMagicOfSantaClaus]]
• Terrible art - [[Nickelback]]
• Winning – [[CharlieSheen]]
• Disapproval – Fry from Futurama [[[278104690058]]

These are few default emoticons you can use.

"You can’t use them in status updates, wall posts, or comments yet. They appear pretty small, but you can hover over the photos to view the username it belongs too. Community Pages, those that aren’t owned by anyone and that display a Wikipedia entry, can’t be used."[Courtesy: Techcrunch]

Update: More you can Find here : REDDIT FB EMOTICONS

Continue reading →

Google+ 'Find My Face' - Facial Recognition - Now it's time to find your face in Photos

Google announced a feature - "Find My Face" that lets members of its online social network automatically find themselves in photos posted by friends.

The "Find My Face" feature being added to Google+ over the next several days is opt-in only, meaning people have to make a point to turn it on.

By leaving it to Google+ members to activate the feature, the Internet giant was sidestepping privacy concerns raised when social networking rival Facebook added facial recognition in an opt-out style this year.

"By turning on Find My Face, Google+ can prompt people you know to tag your face when it appears in photos," Google+ photos team engineer Matt Steiner said in a blog post.

"Of course, you have control over which tags you accept or reject," he explained. "We hope this makes tagging your photos much easier."

Google remains undaunted in its bid to create a flourishing online community that can go toe-to-toe with social networking powerhouse Facebook.

The California firm's popular products and services will increasingly be woven into its nascent but fast-growing Google+ social network to make joining irresistible, executives said at an Internet conference here in October.

"We are in an enviable position that we have people who come to Google," Vic Gundotra, vice president in charge of Google+, said at a Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

"We are in this for the long haul... By Christmas you will see Google+ strategy coming together."


Here’s what Matt Steiner, Engineering Lead on the Google+ Photos team had to say about the feature:

Around the holidays, many of us get together with friends and family, and if you’re like me, you take lots of photos! Tagging those photos can be a lot of work. So today we’re launching Find My Face, an easier way to tag photos of yourself and your friends.


By turning on Find My Face, Google+ can prompt people you know to tag your face when it appears in photos. Of course, you have control over which tags you accept or reject, and you can turn the feature on or off in Google+ settings. (https://plus.google.com/settings/plus)


Find My Face will be rolling out over the next few days. We hope this makes tagging your photos much easier, so try it out! And as always, keep the feedback coming.

Continue reading →

Facebook Reaches Settlement With FTC On Privacy Issues

Facebook agreed to tighten its privacy policies in order to settle charges that it abused users' personal data, the US Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday.

The social networking giant pledged to strengthen customer consent rules on privacy and to shut down all access to accounts deleted by customers in 30 days or less, the FTC said.

Facebook did not admit guilt and was not fined amid charges it shared user information with advertisers and other third parties when users had been told their data was protected.

Facebook was barred from "making any further deceptive privacy claims" and ordered to regularly undergo a third party audit to ensure it is keeping its promises.

"The proposed settlement requires Facebook to take several steps to make sure it lives up to its promises in the future," the FTC said in a statement.

That includes giving consumers "clear and prominent notice and obtaining consumers' express consent before their information is shared beyond the privacy settings they have established."

Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement to users on his own Facebook page that the company had already implemented the promises it had made in the deal with the FTC.

"We're making a clear and formal long-term commitment to do the things we've always tried to do and planned to keep doing -- giving you tools to control who can see your information and then making sure only those people you intend can see it."

The settlement came amid reports that the company was preparing to go public as early as April next year.

Continue reading →

Facebook targets $10 Billion in IPO

Facebook might finally be laying down the groundwork for a highly anticipated initial public offering, long expected to take place sometime after April 2012.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that the world's largest online social network is looking to raise as much as $10 billion in its IPO. The Journal cited people familiar with the matter but did not identify them by name.

The amount would value Facebook at as much as $100 billion, according to the report. That's more than four times the market capitalization that Google Inc. had at the time of its 2004 IPO. This is at least the second time this year that the Journal has floated the $100 billion value for Facebook. It reported in May that the company was growing its profit so fast it could justify such a sky-high valuation.

Federal rules require companies with at least $10 million in assets and more than 500 shareholders to disclose its quarterly financial results and other details. The reporting requirement kicks in 120 days after the fiscal year in which a company exceeds the shareholder threshold for the first time.

Facebook's fiscal year ends Dec. 31, so it would have until late April 2012 to comply with this requirement, having hit the threshold this year.

Founded in a Harvard dorm room in February 2004, Facebook, now based in Palo Alto, Calif., has tried to hold off on an IPO to focus on building its product rather than pleasing investors. But the reporting rules, along with early employees and investors eager to cash in on their stock, are putting it in a bind.

A slew of smaller Internet and social media companies have been trickling on to the public stock market this year. Professional online network LinkedIn Corp. was the first to test the waters in May. Since then, the online deals site Groupon Inc., the Internet radio station Pandora Media Inc. and others have gone public. Others, including the reviews site Yelp Inc. and the online game company Zynga Inc., are planning to do so.

Though hotly anticipated, the latest crop of Internet IPOs has not gone smoothly. Groupon's stock is now trading below its IPO price. It closed at $15.24 on Monday, down 23.8 percent from its $20 IPO price. Pandora has also fallen below its IPO price, though LinkedIn, among the few that's been profitable, is still well above it.

On the secondary market SharesPost, where private company stocks are traded, Facebook was recently valued at about $73 billion. The shares are generally sold by former employees or early investors in these companies, and often there are more buyers than sellers.

Facebook spokesman Jonny Thaw said Facebook is "not going to participate in speculation about an IPO."

Continue reading →