Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it.<p>

Given its vast cash reserves and the glacial pace of business reckonings, that will sound hyperbolic. But that doesn't mean it isn't true.

Think about it: this may well be the only time Zuckerberg will take a company public. That moment of being in New York and ringing that bell is something many entrepreneurs dream about. And he’s forgoing it. Instead, he’s pulling an all-night hackathon with the team as I write this post. It may be posturing but, if that’s the case, it’s brilliant posturing.

Today, we’re happy to announce that the Lightbox team is joining Facebook, where we’ll have the opportunity to build amazing products for Facebook’s 500+ million mobile users.</p><p>

This means we’re no longer accepting new signups. If you’re an existing user, you can continue to use Lightbox.com until June 15 and you can download your photos from here.</p><p>

Facebook is not acquiring the company or any of the user data hosted on Lightbox.com. In the coming weeks, we will be open sourcing portions of the code we’ve written for Lightbox and posting them to our Github repository.

We think of Google and Facebook as Web gorillas.  They’ll be around forever. Yet, with the rate that the tech world is moving these days, there are good reasons to think both might be gone completely in 5 – 8 years.  Not bankrupt gone, but MySpace gone.

There is also wide speculation that Facebook will start its own Internet search engine to rival Google.</p><p>

“Microsoft is simply less concerned about the threat of social to its business than Google is,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner, a research firm, explaining why Microsoft is not concerned about competition with Facebook.</p><p>

“This may be a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” he added.
Jim Prosser, a Google spokesman, declined to comment.

This year the number of internet users worldwide reached 2.27bn, almost exactly twice what it was in 5 years ago, 1.15bn. We all know the Internet is big, but this kind of growth really puts things into perspective.</p><p>

The Internet population has been swelling rapidly since the arrival of the World Wide Web (which rests firmly on top of the foundation provided by the Internet). It’s human nature to get used to changes, so most of us have a tendency to forget how rapidly the world has changed, and keeps changing.</p><p>

And as the internet population grows, so does the potential size of online services. One example of this extreme evolution is Facebook. Last year we noted that Facebook now has more users than the entire Internet had back in 2004, the year the social network was founded.

In a single update, Google could turn Chrome into its own version of Rockmelt -- it would be a social browser that puts Google+ in front of users before they even have a chance to type Facebook.com in the address bar.</p><p>
Don't think Google will do it? It's already started <a href="https://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/p/google-plus.html">releasing extensions</a> that integrate Google+ into Chrome. I suspect that these extensions are just precursors to their eventual integration into Chrome.</p><p>
Facebook may be king of the Web right now, but the browser is still the gateway users must pass through to access the Web. Facebook can't allow Google to control how 30.9 percent of its users access its Web site, especially as its ally (and investor) Microsoft continues to falter in the browser wars.</p><p>
Facebook could try to counter Chrome with Facebook integration in IE, but it wouldn't be the game-changing move Facebook needs to put Google on the defensive. The only way Facebook can knock Google off its feet is to build its own browser and use its massive reach to promote it.

On the morning of Sunday, April 8, Facebook Inc.'s youthful chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, alerted his board of directors that he intended to buy Instagram, the hot photo-sharing service.</p><p>

It was the first the board heard of what, later that day, would become Facebook's largest acquisition ever, according to several people familiar with the matter. Mr. Zuckerberg and his counterpart at Instagram, Kevin Systrom, had already been talking over the deal for three days, these people said.</p><p>


Negotiating mostly on his own, Mr. Zuckerberg had fielded Mr. Systrom's opening number, $2 billion, and whittled it down over several meetings at Mr. Zuckerberg's $7 million five-bedroom home in Palo Alto. Later that Sunday, the two 20-somethings would agree on a sale valued at $1 billion.

The spreadsheet below captures the acquisition date, dollar amounts, and ballpark counts of the users and employees at the time of acquisition. Be warned: any of these numbers are very rough, cobbled together from Internet Archive searches, old news articles, Quora answers, and tech blogs. If you have more accurate information, please leave a comment and I'll fix it.

The other day I picked some choice quotes from 'Marx at 193' (an article by John Lanchester). Here's one: This idea of labour being hidden in things, and the value of things arising from the labour congealed inside them, is an unexpectedly powerful explanatory tool in the digital world.</p><p>

What is the labour encoded in Instagram? It's easy to see.

Snap a digital photo, and the file typically includes embedded information on where and when it was taken. Facebook says Instagram will remain a standalone app separate from the social networking site, but the acquisition could make it easier for marketers, advertisers and the apps and companies one “likes” to access that kind of photo information, says Deborah Mitchell, executive director for the Center of Brand and Product Management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Stratton tells us he received a four-page letter via FedEx on April 2nd which came from Facebook’s lawyers, the Seattle-based firm Perkins Coie. Stratton, who’s actually the founder of Feed.Us, says he’s in “no way related to this Defaceable company,” but confirms he made a comment on the TechCrunch article about Defaceable’s software.

Yahoo attacked Facebook with 10 patents, so Menlo Park has attacked Sunnyvale right back with 10 of its own. Get the popcorn; this is the biggest real-company-versus-patent-troll battle yet.

You’re probably asking yourself how the bad guys are turning this malicious scheme into money. Well, it’s easy: they have total control of the victim’s profile, so they created a service to sell “Likes” on Facebook, especially focused for companies that want to promote their profiles, gaining more fans and visibility: 1000 likes earn R$ 50.00 (around U$ 27.00)

Of course, to sell the “Likes” they use the profile of the victims.

Be careful when using Facebook. And think twice before installing a Google Chrome extension.

Yahoo's decision to sue Facebook for allegedly violating 10 of itspatents covering technologies like online advertising, privacy controls and messaging is widely linked to the determination of the company's new chief executive, Scott Thompson, to get a better return on its assets. Those assets include Yahoo's more than 1,000 U.S. patents, which reflect investments in research and development since the company was founded in 1994.

Some industry executives, however, view Yahoo's suit as a sign of weakness and a break with the Internet industry's tradition of avoiding patent suits.

The company estimates that 58m users accessed the social network solely through mobile apps or the mobile website during December 2011. It did not note what percent of these users are on feature phones versus smartphones, nor did it provide any demographic information about these users. In India, <a href="http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/what-is-facebook-worth-a-view-from-india/">for example</a>, many people access Facebook from phones when they don't have personal computers. The remaining 374m mobile MAUs accessed Facebook from both PCs and mobile devices during that month. The social network says it has 845m total MAU.

The Department of Homeland Security monitors your updates on social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, to uncover “Items Of Interest” (IOI), according to an internal DHS document released by the EPIC. That document happens to include a list of the baseline terms for which the DHS–or more specifically, a DHS subcontractor hired to monitor social networks–use to generate real-time IOI reports.

Nick Bergus recently posted a link on Facebook to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B005MR3IVO/ref=nosim/0sil8">a 55-gallon drum of personal lubricant sold by Amazon</a> -- it's only $1500! Then the post got sponsored and his family and friends started seeing it when they used Facebook, <a href="http://nbergus.com/2012/02/how-i-became-amazons-pitchman-for-a-55-gallon-drum-of-personal-lubricant-on-facebook/">turning Bergus into a pitchman of sorts for an absurd amount of sex lube</a>…

Get used to this...promoted word of mouth is how a lot of advertising will work in the future.

In other words, many companies are taking advantage of Internet Explorer’s poor cookie blocking implementation for their own purposes. Their excuse is that P3P is dead and IE’s cookie blocking would break their website, so they just work around the browser’s privacy controls.

As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.

"The parties acknowledge that FB desires to enable Zynga to build the Zynga Platform on top of the Facebook Platform, and the parties desire to, amongst other goals set forth herein, work together to increase the number of users of each party’s products and services.

The parties further acknowledge that Zynga is making a significant commitment to the Facebook Platform (i.e., using Facebook as the exclusive Social Platform on the Zynga Properties and granting FB certain title exclusivities to Zynga games on the Facebook Platform).

how exactly does Facebook’s ad business work? We still don’t know a lot about that part.
The S-1 mentions “advertising” 123 times, and “advertisers” another 117 times. But when it comes to describing how the company actually sells advertising, it is vague.
We know that some of Facebook’s ads are sold via an automated self-serve system, and some are sold via sales teams working in 30 offices around the world. And we know that Facebook uses an auction system to price some of its inventory, and that it lets advertisers target users to some degree, based on their demographics and interests.
But Facebook doesn’t break any of that out in its filing. It simply has one big bucket labeled “advertising.” There’s no discussion of click-through rates, or the size of the average ad buy, or what percentage of ad buys come from repeat customers, or how “lumpy” its sales are.

Last year, Facebook was named as a defendant in 22 lawsuits accusing it of patent infringement, double the number from 2010, according to a Reuters analysis of court documents on legal database Westlaw, a Thomson Reuters unit.

Facebook is expected to file to raise US$5bn in a preliminary IPO prospectus on Wednesday morning, which while less than anticipated could be increased to ultimate investor demand, according to sources close to the deal.

if you really want your head to spin, think about this: according to a friend in retailing, the average Facebook woman updates her relationship status to “Engaged” within two hours of the guy actually proposing…so Facebook sells that relationship status information to retailers who have bridal registries.

This Safari Extension is based on the bookmarklet by focusontheuser.org. It is just a wrapper for their code and the original developers receive all credit.

The video by Focus on the User explains pretty much everything. The only difference between the bookmarklet and my Safari extension is that you don't have to activate it.

"This is a tool meant to directly expose Google’s recent moves with Google+ as biased, hardcoded, and against Google’s core philosophy (which besides “don’t be evil,” has always been about “focusing on the user”)."