Mark Zuckerberg's Sister Is Out at Facebook
After advocating the end of anonymity, Randi Zuckerberg slipped a bit further into it, leaving her job at Facebook. Let's hope her stock options were vested. Also in today's Valleywag roundup, more Airbnb complaints from readers, Yahoo Mail went down, and Ashton Kutcher was shown up on Twitter.
- With "mixed emotions," Randi Zuckerberg announced she was leaving her brother's company Facebook, where she was the director of marketing and perpetrator of various celebrity interviews. She is starting a company called "RtoZ Media," which will focus on "the exciting trends underway in the media industry." Said trends necessarily include the end of all anonymity on the internet, according to Randi Zuckerberg last week. EFF civil libertarians condemned that position, but the advertising industry to whom Zuckerberg will now cozy up will surely love it.
- People keep emailing us their Airbnb complaints, despite the startup's recent apology for severely underserving its customers. One claims to "know two people that got bedbugs because they rented their apartments to travelers. Total nightmare!" We haven't confirmed that, but given all the other horrible things Airbnb renters are known to have done, an infestation hardly seems out of the question. Tame, even. Still, anyone using Airbnb might want to ask the company if its new $50,000 guarantee covers steaming, pesticides, and treatment for post traumatic stress disorder.
An international vacation property owner wrote in to inform us that Airbnb "sent out a mass email announcing that they are opening an office in Germany (where I live) and looking to hire employees. But they cc'd instead of bcc'd, revealing almost 500 of their German users' email addresses. To make up for it, a few days later they offered us all 50 euro vouchers for airbnb, a cost to them of about 25,000 euros, (±$37K)... I also received TONS of spam from them a year or so ago trying to get me to join their site." This must be another example of the company's "commitment to trust and safety." - Yahoo confirmed an apparently widespread outage of Yahoo Mail today. Related: Some people are still using Yahoo Mail. Didn't you hear there's a marginally better alternative from an arguably less creepy internet conglomerate?
- Who is more easily persuaded to buy crap they don't need over the internet: People who follow cinematic treasure turned tech sugar daddy Ashton Kutcher, or people who follow Kevin Rose, the Reddit casualty and professional backslapper? It turns out the answer is Rose, by a mile: The Digg founder's Twitter followers spent an average of a half cent each in response to a promoted tweet pointing them at gay shopping site Fab.com. Kutcher's followers spent 2/100ths of a cent each. Well, duh: Anyone familiar with Kutcher's propensity for investing in wildly unprofitable companies knows you follow him to get him to spend money on you, not the other way around.