Psychotically corrupt Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich deleted his Facebook account just after the FBI arrested him for trying to sell Obama's vacant Senate seat. Here's what he was trying to get rid of.
Sites like Myspace and Facebook, which are technically called "social networking" sites but are better known as "Lisa is...OMG are you watching The Hills right now? Craziness" ego-projection mechanisms for creating alternate realities, are suffering just like everyone else during this recession. Not traffic-wise; humans' desire to keep the outside world appraised of their moment-to-moment "status" only continues to increase. But money-wise, things are not looking quite so wildly engrossing:
Want a scapegoat for the economic crisis? Mark Zuckerberg looks pretty good right now. Facebook's young CEO dreams of a world where we instantly know each others' emotions. To our peril, we're already pretty close.
A long-dormant virus aimed directly at Facebook struck Thursday, spreading quickly via the social network. What's surprising isn't that Koobface hit Facebook so hard. It's that it took so long to do it.
We make no guarantees as to the authenticity of the blurry Facebook screencaps to land in our inbox this morning, allegedly belonging to sumptuously becoiffed Twilight dreamcake Robert Pattinson, working under the alias "Randle Patrick McMurphy." (Ring any bells? 10th grade English students? Anyone? Anyone?) In one exchange, he laments the life of a newly minted Hollywood It-pire ("everybody are such tossers. the bottle does me fine. the girls in this town are quite odd, you know...") and responds to a query of "get Kristen yet?" with a bloodless, cad-like, "you know I did. You're the one person I've told this to but, she wants me more than that twat of a bf that stalks her every move around me."
[Update: The purported Pattinson pen-pal, Ben Coles, called us to deny that he was speaking with the Twilight star. Read more from Coles here.] Swirling around the release of Twilight, the terrible but terribly successful vampire romance movie, were rumors of a hookup between stars Kristen Stewart and heartthrob Robert Pattinson. This sounded like so much publicity fodder for the film's teenage target demos. This might be more of the same: A tipster forwarded the following screenshots, purportedly of a Pattinson Facebook account under the alias of Randle Patrick McMurphy (Jack Nicholson's character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest).
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.
You know what's important these days? Appearances. Reality is something you're stuck with: you're ugly, out of shape, and none too charismatic. But appearances—now there's something you can do something about! That's why selecting the right online avatar to represent yourself on Facebook is now the single most important choice that you will make in your life, according to some people willing to be quoted spouting bullshit theories about any old thing:
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.
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.
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.
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?Kara Swisher has typed up everything she knows on the deal. The short version: Facebook offered stock, Twitter wanted cash. Facebook wanted to use last year's ridiculous $15 billion valuation for its shares. The End. Williams always seems to know what's hot and what's not. Right now, his board is supporting his instincts: Build out Twitter's service before trying to make money from it, just as Google did for a few years. When the economy comes back, Twitter will be even bigger, and the offers even better — maybe even from Facebook.
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.It's not for lack of trying. Silicon Valley's stock-options millionaire make money by getting the right to buy shares at a low price and selling them for a higher one. Facebook's soaring valuation — Microsoft invested $240 million for a tiny stake, in a deal which valued all of Facebook at $15 billion — threatened to undo that equation. How is Facebook supposed to soar past $15 billion in value? So Zuckerberg & Co. turned to issuing restricted stock units, or RSUs, instead. (Restricted stock units are common at large companies like Google and Microsoft, but unusual for a company Facebook's size and age.) The restricted-stock plan has created a new complication: Once it has more than 500 RSU holders, SEC regulations may require Facebook to start publishing its financials, even if it doesn't conduct an initial public offering. Facebook's revenues still aren't pretty enough for public exposure. Facebook's lawyers have sought, and obtained, an exemption. Part of the argument they made is that issuing RSUs won't create a market in Facebook shares. Facebook, unusually for most of Silicon Valley's private companies, has not had many restrictions on what employees and other shareholders could do with the shares they own. Most have rules that force shareholders to offer shares to the company first — a right of first refusal — or outright prohibitions on unauthorized sales. But the letter Facebook sent to the SEC says that even when the stock units convert to common shares, they have limits on their sale: "... the Plan has been structured to preclude any trading of RSUs or any interest therein from developing." Even if Facebook permits an employee convert their stock units to shares and sell them, the company can then prevent the buyer from selling. Employees at Facebook — especially the early ones, whose holdings are now substantial — have been agitating for some time to sell their shares, and there are still, even with the public markets taking a beating, interested buyers. Zuckerberg finally bowed to this pressure and set up a program, now underway, to let employees cash out up to $900,000 in shares. (Note the symbolism of the figure: No one will become a millionaire.) But that may be it. If Facebook extends its stock-sale restrictions to common shares, not just the restricted-stock units, both employees and the investors so eager to snap up their shares will be stuck, until Facebook sells out or goes public. Zuckerberg has made it clear he thinks both of those events are far off — and the 24-year-old CEO still owns 27 percent of the company and more or less controls the board. It's a dicey gamble. The prospect of selling Facebook shares privately must surely have attracted some employees who counted on a relatively quick cash-out. But shutting down the prospect of further stock sales will make sure the Facebookers who remain will be more committed to the company for the long haul. Zuckerberg doesn't have much choice. As long as Facebook employees can find buyers for their shares, they'll be tempted to leave rather than stay at a company going through a tumultous adolescence. Already, the company has had far more turnover, from bottom to top, than Google did. Not a single high-ranking exec left Google for the first six years of its existence. Facebook has lost three of its four cofounders, and numerous people underneath them, from former COO Owen Van Natta on down. No wonder Zuckerberg wants to slam the exit door closed.
President-elect Barack Obama has picked Tim Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, rather than former Harvard University president Larry Summers, as Treasury secretary. That makes it unlikely that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who worked for Summers when he ran the Treasury for Bill Clinton, will return to Washington.
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."Every day, you need to create a to-do list," Rose told Kendall. "You put the items you need to do on the list, and you need to review the list with me every day. As you do them, you need to cross them off." Kendall's retort, which he delivered not to Rose but to friends within and without Facebook: "No shit Sherlock, I didn't get to where I am today without knowing how to manage a to-do list!" What's odd about this rumor: Rose doesn't have a reputation as a micromanager, and the two both worked at Amazon.com before joining Facebook. They put on a convincing buddy act for the New York Times recently, too. Anyone care to play Encyclopedia Brown and help piece together this puzzle? My only conclusion: The best algorithms can't predict what will break a friendship. (Photo by Chris Pan)
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)
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.In a conversation — conducted on instant messenger, the computer-moderated communications mode of choice for the socially impaired — Zuckerberg reveals that he hopes Facebook will one day broadcast its users very emotions. French probes him on this issue in the following exchange:
Fox News would like you to get to know its angry shouting heads a little bit better. Perhaps you'd like to know what sort of pants Sean Hannity doesn't wear on camera? Or the worst of Greta Van Susteren's college grades? Or who Bill O'Reilly has beaten to death with his bare hands? The name of Shep Smith's favorite piano bar? As TVNewser discovered, you can answer a disconcertingly high percentage of these questions on the"Fun Facts" section of Fox News' new Facebook page. All the disturbing profiles are after the jump. (Actually, Shep's is more immaculate than disturbing, but then that's about what you'd expect from the anchor, right?)
Mark Zuckerberg's social network has lost much of its swagger over the past year. He once thought nothing of poaching Google's best and brightest; then Google started poaching back. After Facebook's flacks learned that Google had scheduled its holiday press party on December 8, the same day as Facebook's planned media fest, they rescheduled for December 10, rather than fight for reporters' affections. Embarrassing — especially considering that Facebook's top PR guy, Elliot Schrage, came from Google himself.
