The Fortune and Power of Mark Zuckerberg
February 3, 2012 by admin · Leave a Comment
Among the deluge of Facebook articles currently in circulation, two are particularly interesting for their distinct focus on the man behind it all: twenty-seven-year-old Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, of White Plains, New York (at this stage, his saga certainly deserves some historicizing). The first, written by Somini Sengupta, appears in the New York Times; the second in the Los Angeles Times, and is written by perennial tech-beat savant Nathaniel Olivarez-Giles.
Sengupta highlights the degree of control that Zuckerberg has managed to retain at this significant stage of maturation for Facebook; as the company heads into its colossal IPO, Le Zuck holds approximately 60 percent of his company’s shares as well as three out of five board chairs — that means he has an almost unprecedented amount of control over a company of such proportions. Sengupta also discusses the important role former-Facebook president Sean Parker had in advising and guiding Zuckerberg to such levels of company power.
Olivarez-Giles shares that starting January 1, 2013, the person behind “frictionless sharing” will be paid only $1 dollar per year for his work as company CEO. Zuckerberg’s salary for 2012 is expected to be $600,000, but it’s unlikely he’ll be missing the six-figure salary since his personal fortune is about to rocket into the eleven-figure range, and the new token salary is a tradition among ultra-rich leaders — the late Steve Jobs from Apple, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, and even Google CEO Larry Page have all received that loneliest of numbers as their base annual salary.
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Graffiti Artist David Choe’s Facebook Stock Worth $200 Million
February 2, 2012 by admin · Leave a Comment
Thanks to Facebook’s upcoming IPO, David Choe, a graffiti artist from Los Angeles’ Koreatown, is about to become a millionaire hundreds of times over. Back in 2005, Choe was invited by Sean Parker, the then-president of Facebook, to paint interior murals for the company’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California. When Facebook’s headquarters were moved north to Menlo Park, Choe was invited again to spruce up the new walls, this time by the social network’s CEO and co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
It seems that Choe is very big on foresight: he opted to receive company shares instead of currency for his work. Those shares are now expected to be worth some $200 million. Choe is among an elite cadre of approximately one thousand individuals slated to become millionaires later this year when they cash in their Facebook stock. The company is expected to go public around May.
A detail of Choe’s mural work for Facebook can be seen in the image above — the network’s famous homepage atlas motif has been re-imagined with a good dose of vibrancy and humor. Although he began experimenting with his art in the streets of Los Angeles, David Choe also honed his talent in Oakland’s California College of Arts and Crafts.
Read More:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46234749/ns/business-us_business/
Facebook Celebrates 8th Birthday by Filing for IPO
February 1, 2012 by admin · Leave a Comment
The day investors and tech watchers have been waiting for is here: Facebook filed its IPO today, which happens to be its eighth birthday. Its anticipated valuation range is $75 billion to $100 billion, but in the papers submitted with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the wildly popular company states that it hopes its IPO will net it $5 billion. Everyone is expecting Facebook’s stock market début to be record-setting. As of this moment, the IPO is expected to occur in May.
The rumor had been circulating that some Facebook shares would be made available to small investors, but the filing gives no indication of preparations for such a proceeding, alas. Working at Facebook are 3,200 individuals, and by the Los Angeles Times’ account, roughly one-third of them will become newly minted millionaires.
The filing included a letter written by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO and co-founder, and in context of where they appear, and the enormity of the wealth that is about to be hoisted onto the company and those responsible for it, some of Zuckerberg’s words rest enigmatic. He writes: “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services,” and adds, “I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.”
All eyes are on Facebook: in the picture above, Mark Zuckerberg smiles along with famed journalist Charlie Rose and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, who’s already being called a viable future presidential candidate.
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http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fiw-facebookipo-web-20120201,0,1236022.story
Pretty-In-Pink Valley Girl Interviews Sheryl Sandberg
January 20, 2012 by admin · Leave a Comment
Facebook’s new digs in Menlo Park were recently visited by Jesse Draper, the host of “The Valley Girl,” an online talk show based in the Silicon Valley. Draper was on the hallowed (for tech devotees) premises to interview the company’s celebrated chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. During the interview, Sandberg chatted about her first job as an office assistant; she greeted patients for an ophthalmologist boss — her father — during her tenure. Sandberg also shared tidbits about her subsequent stint as an aerobics instructor.
The show’s cameras made sure viewers got a good eyeful of the newly opened quarters. Highlights included a communal office bike, touch-screen soda machines, endless snacks, and a concrete message wall that replicates the spirit of the well-know virtual walls found on typical Facebook profiles.
Finally, Sandberg laid bare what impresses her the most about the company she helps run: the big “impact” that Facebook has in people’s lives, including her own, in matters that go beyond the daily toil of work. She even spoke of having felt less alone after sharing publicly, through her Facebook profile, an obituary she wrote for her recently deceased grandmother. She said she read every one of the Facebook comments she received following the post.
In addition to her high-powered position at Facebook, Sandberg also sits on the corporate boards of Starbucks and Disney.
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Facebook Shedding Its Echo Chamber Name
January 17, 2012 by admin · Leave a Comment
For some time now, Facebook has been saddled with the unfortunate sobriquet of Echo Chamber. As anyone who’s ever tried knows all too well, ditching an unwanted nickname is more than a little complicated (read: Difficult). But, since the company behind your online life record has the motivation, human resources, and economic means to carry out data studies that can, ahem, empirically disprove the basis on which such an inglorious moniker was erected, Facebook has done just that.
The Facebook Data Team, which harking back to Facebook’s origins in the realm of Ivy League scholarship carries out academic-style research studies, has just cranked out another pointy-headed paper. Eytan Bakshy, a recent Ph.D. from the University of Michigan’s School of Information helmed the study that looked at how previously unknown information is passed along among Facebook friends. His research underscores the importance of the inordinate amount of weak social ties Facebookers accumulate the longer they remain on the network. According to the paper published by Bakshy and his Facebook team, those weak ties do a lot of the heavy lifting related to the introduction of new information to users, thereby giving a good shaking to the Echo Chamber theory, which postulates that we only read/think/opine like our closest Facebook friends.
More details about the study can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-team/rethinking-information-diversity-in-networks/10150503499618859
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“Bias-Riddled” Facebook Comments Attributed to NYPD Officers Surface
December 7, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
In September, Benjamin Moore, a Brooklyn attorney defending Tyrone Johnson from gun possession charges found “No More West Indian Day Detail,” a then-public Facebook group whose members were, presumably, actual New York City police officers venting about Brooklyn’s annual West Indian American Day Parade. The comments made by the group were vitriolic and openly racist. The group disappeared a few days after Moore encountered it, but he had already made a copy of the postings that went on for 70 pages.
Sgt. Dustin Edwards, the officer responsible for Tyrone Johnson’s arrest, belonged to the group. Subsequent journalistic fact-checking showed that group members’ names had a 60 percent match with those of registered police officers. After wielding his social media findings to acquit his client, Benjamin Moore gave a copy of them to the New York Times, arguing that the comments “raised broad questions about police attitudes.”
The disturbing commentary included statements like “Let them kill each other,” in reference to parade participants. With ominous echoes of last century’s and this one’s painful war history, one commenter declared: “I say have the parade one more year, and when they all gather drop a bomb and wipe them all out.” “Filth,” “savages,” “animals,” and “ghetto training,” were part of the documented hate speech.
Social media encourages casual, personal, and private conversations, but it really constitutes a new public record of everyday people’s lives and thoughts. The officers in question are now being investigated by the N.Y.P.D.’s Internal Affairs Bureau.
Above, women participate in the 2011 West Indian American Day Parade in Brooklyn, NY.
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Facebook Increases Status Update Limit to 63,000 Characters
December 1, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
On Facebook, the company team posted an image whose graphic text announced a new limit for status updates: 63,206 characters. It’s rather staggering if compared to Twitter’s or even Facebook’s own from a few years back. Nevertheless, Google weighs in as the heavyweight champ in this matter; it currently boasts a peerless 100,000 character limit.
It’s still a very nice try from Facebook. The graphic also displays a nifty timeline of Facebook’s rapid progression into the character limit stratosphere with shaded box visualizations and all to compare the limit increases. Originally, FB’s updates could not exceed 160 characters, but that changed in 2009 to 420 characters. This past July it reached 500; two months later 5,000, and less than three months afterwards it’s at 63,206. Is there a reason for the accelerating limit?
There’s no clear info on that besides Mark Zuckerberg and Co. not wanting to let Google out-edge it in any important factor. If that’s solely the case, then another value increase may be in the works. Although, the final value seems to not have been completely random. According to Bob Baldwin, the software engineer who “chose” the number, he reached it through the following “nerdy” way: “Facebook … Face Boo K … hex(FACE) – K … 64206 – 1000 = 63206.” Go figure.
Read More:
https://www.facebook.com/schrep/posts/203969696349811
Facebook to Settle with the Federal Trade Commission Regarding Broken Privacy Promises
November 29, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
In a press release, today, the Federal Trade Commission gave news that it had reached a settlement with Facebook regarding charges of consumer deception and broken privacy promises. Although the document noted that the charges fell under the umbrella category of “administrative complaint,” and did not constitute a ruling with respect to the violation of the law, the commission believes that Facebook transgressed federal law when it told users that their information would remain private and unavailable to third parties like advertisers or the general public, which was not the case. The FTC called Facebook’s claims “unfair and deceptive.”
With the settlement, which is open to public comments until December 30th of this year, Facebook will agree to henceforth give “clear and prominent notice and obtai[n] consumers’ express consent before their information is shared beyond the privacy settings they have established.” Another part of the deal is that for the coming twenty years, Facebook will undergo regular audits, about every two years, to assess its privacy practices.
Jon Leibowits, the FTC’s chairman, said that “Facebook is obligated to keep the promises about privacy that it makes to its hundreds of millions of users,” and that “Facebook’s innovation does not have to come at the expense of consumer privacy.” Adding, “The FTC action will ensure it will not.”
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http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2011/11/privacysettlement.shtm
Facebook Researchers Say It’s 4.74 Degrees of Separation, Not Six
November 22, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Facebook teamed up with the Università degli Studi di Milano to revisit Stanley Milgram’s 1967 experiment concerning the number of social connections separating any two people. The results from the new investigation point to there being a separation of 4.74 degrees between individuals instead of six. The Italian and American team’s conclusions were published Monday on Facebook. The two research papers can be read at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4503 and http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4570.
During the original Milgram experiment, data obtained from a mere 296 volunteers was used. By comparison, Facebook and U. degli Studi di Milano looked at data from all 721 million of Facebook’s users. As everyone is mentioning, that number is more than one-tenth of the entire world’s population.
The notion of “six degrees of separation,” has had a long history. It first appeared in 1929 in the Hungarian short story “Chains,” by Frigyes Karinthy. More recently, the idea was popularized in United States by the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, in which players attempt to connect anyone within the movie industry to the Footloose actor. The premise is that anyone can be connected to Bacon within six degrees.
Via Twitter, Bacon himself agreed with those opining that the new figure lacks the sonorous ring of the old one.
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On Facebook, Rihanna’s Entire New Album is Streaming for Free
November 21, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Shakira and Barack Obama may currently be besting Rihanna in Twitter rankings, but the Barbadian songstress is doing her part on the social media scene to change the status quo. Last week, RiRi, as she’s known to her fans, let pop music lovers everywhere get a compete earful of her newest album, “Talk That Talk,” through her Facebook page. The free Facebook streaming came four days before the official November 21st release date.
Today, you can head over to the most impossibly retro-cool record shop around to get your hands on the disc, download it from iTunes, or continue streaming it for free to save some money for Thursday’s feast. The pre-release Facebook streaming of Rihanna’s sixth album was part of “Unlocked,” a big publicity campaign that so far has proved successful.
The Los Angeles Times is reporting that since “Unlocked” began, Rihanna has gained a million new Twitter followers and over 700,000 Facebook fans. The campaign, which got underway in September, involved delegating “missions” to fans; upon their completion, information about Rihanna’s new studio material was revealed.
As of this writing, the first single off “Talk That Talk,” “We Found Love,” is at the top of Billboard’s Hot 100. On the left is the cover of the album’s deluxe edition.
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http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2011/11/rihanna-streams-talk-that-talk-on-facebook.html
