Twitter CEO Evan Williams turned down Facebook’s $500 million

Twitter CEO Evan Williams always seems to be where the action is. He sold his blogging company to Google in 2003. He chased the short-lived podcasting craze with another startup. That company accidentally spawned Twitter, the microblogging service that’s stolen the buzz from bloggers. It seems sensible that Williams would sell Twitter to Facebook, another social networking site that actually makes money. So why did he and his board turn down a $500 million offer from Facebook?

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Making Facebook Safe Against Spam

Last Friday, Facebook won an important victory for our users – and against spam and those who create it.

We’ve all experienced spam – those unwanted and, sometimes, inappropriate marketing messages. The bad guys behind those messages are always looking to find new ways to annoy people and Facebook’s users have been among those targeted. We don’t take this affront to our users lying down.

In a court in San Jose, after a legal proceeding lasting four months, federal Judge Jeremy Fogel awarded Facebook $873 million in damages against Adam Guerbuez and Atlantis Blue Capital for sending sleazy messages to our users. The award is the largest judgment in history for an action brought under Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM).

Does Facebook expect to quickly collect $873 million and share the proceeds in some way with our users? Alas, no. It’s unlikely that Geurbez and Atlantis Blue Capital could ever honor the judgment rendered against them (though we will certainly collect everything we can). But we are confident that this award represents a powerful deterrent to anyone and everyone who would seek to abuse Facebook and its users.

Read The Rest at Facebook’s Official Blog

Facebook Needs a new CEO

Let me tell you what will happen in Tech Industry in 2009. I think, most of the bloggers, experts, developers, publishers, advertisers will start to say “seriosly”; Facebook needs a new CEO. Yeah, they’ll say that; World’s 5th most visited site has to earn more. When you compare Facebook’s earnings with PlentyOfFish.com, you get surprised. Plentyoffish has nearly 1 million registered users and earns more than 350.000 dollars a month.  That’s really amazing. Facebook was not a very-well-monetized-web-site before indeed, but the new facebook design, killed and doubled unsuccess.  Okay Mark Zuckerberg is a genious, he is a smart guy but if he keeps on being an over-self-confidence guy, it will directly hurt facebook. I think, facebook urgently needs a new layout, needs to use 3rd party advertisers instead of their own flyers, they need to use large size of ad banners, and they need a new CEO, maybe.

The “New” Facebook: Learning From Old Mistakes

A few weeks ago, I logged on to Facebook to see if any of my friends had dared to challenge me in another game of word twist. As was expected, due to my unprecedented dominance in the game, no one had. What was not expected, however, was an inconspicuous link at the top of the page telling me to try the “New” Facebook. So, I decided to check it out.

This “New” Facebook had an entirely different layout, putting many elements of friends’ Profiles on various tabs and allowing for greater control of what your friends see on your profile. In my opinion, the change was an upgrade. Gone were the days of needing to scroll past super pokes, ninja and pirate fights, graffiti, aquariums, and the latest roshombo matches to write on the walls of friends who don’t seem to know how to click “no” to application invites. In general, things felt cleaner and easier to use. Not everybody sees it the way I do though. When I showed it to my boyfriend, he was appalled at the changes. He had gotten used to Facebook’s layout and did not want to go through the hassle of learning a new layout and figuring out how to do what he wants to do on Facebook. Read The Rest

Saving and Keeping Personal Rubbish Information and Logs Undertaked by Facebook

Saving and Keeping Personal Rubbish Information and Logs Undertaked by Facebook. No one ventured to do this but Facebook. Keeping the rubbish of the World and making a few bucks from it doesn’t seem like a good business plan. It’s a big gamble i think. There is something risky and this is the reason why many big tech proffessionals are still sober.

Imitation is the soul of flattery, and the engine of Silicon Valley, Hence, Mark Zuckerberg Did it

Imitation is the soul of flattery, and the engine of Silicon Valley. Whatever can be copied, will be — especially when the copiers are pals. After a redesign, Facebook has made its status-update feature more prominent. It now asks users, “What are you doing right now? A sharp-eyed reader notes that those words are eerily similar to Twitter’s “What are you doing?” We wonder if this will pose any problems for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s newfound friendship with Twitter founder Ev Williams.

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The Facebook Movie - Aaaron Sorkin Writing a Movie About The Founding Of The Popular Social Network.

The Facebook story is coming soon to a cineplex near you. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin confirmed yesterday on a Facebook group that he is writing a movie about the founding of the popular social network. A day after Facebook announced that it reached 100 million users around the world, Sorkin (or his assistant) wrote on the group page that he “just agreed to write a movie for Sony and producer Scott Rudin about how Facebook was invented.” Read The Rest

I just wonder; Will Aaron Sorkin will make a research or listen to Connectu’s founders before writing about that stuff? I don’t think so. If they’ll use “facebook” name in the film, Sorkin will obey Zuckerberg ’s rules

Has the social-networking phenomenon gotten so hot that it’s about to burn out? You’ve got to wonder. There are niche sites for everybody — and I do mean everybody.

Has the social-networking phenomenon gotten so hot that it’s about to burn out? You’ve got to wonder. There are niche sites for everybody — and I do mean everybody.

(Credit: Andrea Mohin/The New York Times)

Scrabulous removed from Facebook

Scrabulous: no longer available in the UK. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP

Facebook users in the UK have finally lost access to Scrabulous, the unofficial version of the Scrabble word game, after a formal complaint by the rights holder Mattel.

Scrabulous has built a user base of more than 600,000 people globally on the social networking site, but it was closed to Facebook users in the US and Canada after a similar rights claim by Hasbro, the North American Scrabble rights holder.

The game is still available in India, where it was developed by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla. But the brothers were critical of Facebook for giving in to Mattel’s demand to remove the game on Friday from the rest of the world, including the UK.

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comScore is out with their June Ad Metrix analysis of the top online display advertising publishers and advertisers in the U.S.

comScore is out with their June Ad Metrix analysis of the top online display advertising publishers and advertisers in the U.S. On the publisher side, Fox Interactive Media leads the pack with 52.3 billion ad views. MySpace accounted for 51 billion of the 52.3 billion hence my story title. Facebook came in sixth with 3 billion ads and Glam made the report in tenth with just over 2 billion ads.

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