• meltdowns

    Facebook cancels employee stock sale

    So much for Silicon Valley's latest get-rich-quick scheme. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has cancelled a plan to let employees cash out their shares early. More »

    4:20 PM on Thu Dec 4 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    4,083 views, 13 comments

  • twitter

    Twitter's bad news is a bad business

    People who use Twitter, a service which posts short updates to the Web and cell phones, love nothing more than to Twitter about themselves, and the medium they've so enthusiastically adopted. If you go by the Twitterers' collective reporting, every event, from an earthquake in Los Angeles to terrorist bombings in Mumbai, is more notable for the fact that people are writing about it on Twitter than for its inherent interest as news. The dominant narrative of Twitter is the rise of Twitter, the latest force to displace the mainstream media and roil the world's information economy. Too bad the real story of the company is one of top-to-bottom incompetence. More »

    9:00 AM on Tue Dec 2 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    13,014 views, 47 comments

    Most discussed sample032: "...Twitter faces large bills from cell-phone companies which charge it for forwarding text messages to cell phones" Someone from Meebo told more »

  • social networks

    Why Facebook wants to spam your News Feed

    Social networks have a lifecycle: They start with a small core of early adopters, swell as mainstream users get pulled in by their friends, and then see growth taper off as people get turned off by spam. That's why Friendster is forgotten and why MySpace is looking increasingly stagnant. The price for reaching an audience advertisers care about seems to be a site users can't stand. Facebook, however, isn't following the fashionable trend. More »

    Feature

    9:00 AM on Mon Dec 1 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    15,617 views, 16 comments

    Most discussed Migrant Blogger: Wow, this is, like, a real article. more »

  • Tim the IT Guy

    Facebook loses its members' email settings

    It's on an O'Reilly blog, so it must be true: Facebook has lost some users' email settings. The company had to send them an apology, and a request to reset things. Let me explain in sysadmin jargon: That's fucked. Not because Facebook's engineers failed at Backups 101, but because by now the Marketing department has figured out they can reset all our email preferences to "Spam Me Like Crazy" by pretending to lose them again in January. Laugh while it's still funny.

    1:50 PM on Tue Nov 25 2008
    By Tim the IT Guy
    1,166 views, 8 comments

    Most discussed neekolas: I got this message two days ago. No spam, though. They switched all the settings to 'off', so I stopped getting more »

  • evan williams

    Why Twitter's CEO 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? More »

    8:29 AM on Mon Nov 24 2008
    By Paul Boutin
    6,522 views, 34 comments

    Most discussed upbeat: What else can twitter do? Its a one trick pony. more »

  • jackpot

    Is the great Facebook stock sale over?

    Through the golden heart of every world-changing startup pulses an avaricious get-rich-quick scheme. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the billionaire-boy cofounders of Google, established this doing-well-by-doing-good myth. But Mark Zuckerberg hasn't been able to make the same magic happen for his employees. In his efforts to make good by them, he may end up quashing a nascent market in Facebook shares. More »

    1:40 PM on Fri Nov 21 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    9,135 views, 11 comments

    Most discussed growhappy: Facebook should be in the business of licensing their social network code to people and businesses who want to make more »

  • cubicle culture

    Facebook less like a college dorm than you'd think

    One imagines Facebook as a geek utopia, where hackers who dropped out of college play Rock Band all day, then stay up all night coding. The reality: It's as depressingly Dilbertian as any other company — and COO Sheryl "No-Fun" Sandberg is making sure it keeps getting more boring every day. Take the latest tiff we happened to hear about — in the social network's business-development department, the home of glad-handing charmers who negotiate deals. You'd think they'd be experts at sucking up to each other. Tim Kendall (shown left), the company's director of monetization — Valleyspeak for "guy who comes up with ideas to make money" — was left fuming after his boss, VP Dan Rose, instructed him in the art of time management. More »

    5:00 PM on Wed Nov 19 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    7,158 views, 16 comments

    Latest by Shadowlayer: Whoa, a to-do list! nobody told me this contraption existed! Wait, actually my dad told me about it, when I was more »

  • caption contest

    French blue shirt, khakis shortage hits Valley hard

    A tipster sent in this photo of Facebook's business-development team, taken in bubblier times at a September offsite in St. Helena, north of San Francisco, where they played a croquet tournament. (Rules about wearing white after Labor Day don't apply in northern California's bubbly clime.) Now more than ever, Facebook needs to develop a business; can this crowd swing their mallets? Suggest a caption in the comments; the best one will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: godospoons for "Jerry Yang explains Internet to Best Buy employees." (Photo courtesy of a thoughtful tipster)

    4:00 PM on Wed Nov 19 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    2,552 views, 21 comments

    Most discussed godospoons: "French Blue Shirt, Khaki Shortage Hits Valley Hard" more »

  • facebook

    Mark Zuckerberg wants to know how you feel

    Why have social networks blossomed in as antisocial an environment as Silicon Valley? Because they allow computers to become a crutch for a task most engineers find imposing: dealing with other human beings. Turning relationships into a social graph that can be fed into a database and ruled by algorithms is a genius move for tech's clumsy savants. Alex French, a writer for GQ, interviewing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for a profile, wonders if his cold stare and cagey responses are an incredibly calculating attempt to intimidate, or merely a sign that he's awkward. Either way, Zuckerberg shows a disdain for displays of emotion. Asked if he celebrated Microsoft's $240 million investment in Facebook, Zuckerberg seems puzzled by the question's premise. And yet emotion is at the core of Zuckerberg's plan for world domination. More »

    1:00 PM on Tue Nov 18 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    7,475 views, 35 comments

    Most discussed its_a_feature: That's a truly awesome picture of the Zuck -- in a "40-year old virgin" sort of way. more »