It’s hard to believe that Facebook is nearly a decade old. I can remember when it was just a social media toddler spreading across colleges. Oh, how it has grown. The last five years have been tumultuous but successful for the most popular website in the world. It was in 2008 that Microsoft gave the ultimate bid of credibility to the site by investing in it, something that the software giant rarely did for up-and-comers like a social network. It can be argued that it was at that point that the attention of the world really turned to Mark Zuckerberg’s baby and the site has stayed in the forefront of media…

For a man who built an online empire that is dedicated to make as much of our lives as public as possible, Facebook co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been able to keep his personal life in the dark and his media attention under control for the most part. We know very little about the man other than what he has been willing to share. Is he really that boring or is he simply a master of privacy in the public world he’s building? It could be a mixture of the two. He knows about privacy. He may know more about online privacy than any CEO in the world. It’s his job to make people disregard their privacy, to encourage…

Facebook graph search has the potential to be a great thing for Facebook and its users. Perhaps more importantly, this is the first major play that Facebook has made in a long time that has not been attacked as another attempt by Facebook to attack our user privacy. That didn’t stop the folks at Geek Culture from creating a comic about it.  …

As Facebook’s stock continues to plummet, more investors are calling for CEO Mark Zuckerberg to step down. They say he is a smart man who built an incredible service and grew it to an unprecedented size for social networks but that he’s not qualified to take the company to the next level (or maintain it at its current level). They say he just isn’t the right person to be running a public company. They say his intentions are not aligned with the needs of the investors the way a CEO should be thinking. Mark Zuckerberg would agree. “There are people who are really good managers, people who can manage a big…

It seems we have seen the last of Google Places. As of May 30, Goggle+ Local has resulted in the replacement of Google Places.  Approximately 80 million Google Place pages all over the world have been automatically converted into 80 million Google+ Local pages. Google+ Local, which is integrated with free Zagat reviews, offers users the ability to rate their favorite businesses via social media. Replacing the star rating of Google+ with the 30 point Zagat rating is believed to encourage users to participate more often with business owned Google+ pages. With Google Places out of the picture,…

Recently the co-chairmen of the Bi-Partisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, Edward Markley and Joe Barton, sent a letter requesting that Mark Zuckerberg give details about Facebook’s plan to permit pre-teens access to the social mediasite. [caption id="" align="alignright" width="200" caption="Image via CrunchBase"][/caption] With children under 13 years old being protected by the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act which demands that parents give their consent regarding personal data to websites, it’s going to be difficult for Zuckerberg to carry through with…

So, after a couple of weeks, the truth has come out about GM’s sudden Facebook ad maneuver. Or at least some of the story. It appears that there was something of a power struggle between Mark Zuckerberg and GM. And for once, kudos to Mr. Zuckerberg for standing his ground. He seems to remember what his social media baby is all about. And it’s not necessarily just about social media marketing. It seems that GM wanted to place full page ads on Facebook, an idea which was rejected. So like a spoiled child, GM took their ball and went home. GM’s maneuver forces a number of issues into the limelight regarding…

Facebook gives itself a facelift by improving the user experience yet again. Facebook’s Timeline, which was implemented back earlier in the year, was given the digital makeover by compressing the user profile across the cover photo. Previous Timelines were bulky and gaudy, with large tabs under the cover photo where profile visitors could cruise a user’s profile. Timeline has now designed the user’s profile to be subtle and manageable but does this improvement really do anything for the Facebook experience? With millions of dollars in revenue from the Facebook IPO and all the publicity…

“Take a Bit Out of Crime” is a phrase that was often uttered by McGruff the Crime Dog, a fictional dog who despised criminals for reasons I am unsure about (we never did see his origin story, here’s to hoping for a Christopher Nolan directed “McGruff Begins”). The famous PSA character did his best to provide a good example and keep people from committing crimes. Now, Facebook may be doing the same exact thing by accident. More and more people are committing crimes, whether they are aware of it or not and then they brag about their illegal exploits on their Facebook page. It’s never a good…

Play time is over. It’s time to get down to business. That’s the semi-embraced mantra at Facebook, depending on who you talk to. The alternate mantra being felt in the Facebook underground is about how to keep the party going and still cash in. Publicly, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in the first camp, but most people can tell by his actions as well as by reading between the line through some of his statements that his heart is with the second camp. It could be argued that Facebook is where it is because it was built with the idea that revenue was an engine for innovation, not the other way around. They have become…