Perhaps the only thing sadder than seeing a friend with a Facebook broken heart in their mini-feed is spotting a friend who has Barack Obama as their Facebook picture. It's one thing to be a "fan" of Barack Obama, or even Michelle Obama, who is admittedly quite fierce. But when a friend changes their profile picture to Barack Obama and joins the supplemental Facebook group, one has to wonder what they're thinking.
Former Chicago magazine media critic and founding editor of The Beachwood Reporter, Steve Rhodes, doesn't want to join your stupid Facebook fan page. He especially doesn't want to be notified every time some inky hack publishes another article, according to a ranty email he sent all his "friends" this week. Rhodes is doubly outraged by "You newspaper people who are ruining Facebook for everyone." Here's the rest:
Who is Soren Dayton, the McCain campaign aide suspended over a YouTube link on Twitter? He's a consultant specializing in "'modern' ('new') media communications," an alumnus of the University of Chicago and the National Defense University, and a Republican true believer. Here he's pictured with evangelical republican La Shawn Barber at the BlogWorld conference, and she's, like, totally black! So he's not necessarily racist, just an opportunist who knows a good smear video when he sees one.
We humans are a fickle bunch. Take Eliot Spitzer: besides the receding hairline, the guy had everything going for him. And yet he threw it all away to make the career of some hot piece of Jersey trash. And we're always trying to figure out what makes us happy. There all always studies coming out about how religion makes us happy, how cats help your heart and whether cigarettes can do anything for your psyche. And that's just this week's batch of articles. Cigarettes, sex, and meaningless studies aren't doing it for us apparently. So what does make us happy?
Any doubts Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is targeting Google? First Zuckerberg hired away Google ad-operations exec Sheryl Sandberg as Facebook's COO. Now he's going straight for Google's advertising customers. Reading BNet, a tipster came across a banner ad from Facebook. It read: "Reach your customers before they start searching." Check out the screenshot, below.
Social network fatigue is nothing new, at least to The 250, and VCs are finally catching on — the Starbucks social network might be the watershed moment when everyone stepped back from updating their umpteenth profile, put down the double-tall soy mocha and said to themselves, "You know, maybe we've reached the point of diminishing returns."
Child-website Babble launched its Playground today, a "social network for young families." What, the bars and coffeeshops of Park Slope and Boerum Hill and the entire world isn't enough of a social network for these people? It has photos of babies and videos of babies. Some of those babies appear to be in bars. The topics in the discussion forum? Priceless. (Those baby-hormones really start to affect typing/thinking skills, don't they?)
Buried on the bottom edge of your browser, Facebook's new instant-messaging feature "is meant to be really unobtrusive and there when you need it," explains Facebook project manager Peter Deng in a video demonstrating Facebook Chat, below. We know it's unobtrusive because Mark Zuckerburg put Facebook's easily missed Beacon opt-out notifications in the same spot. More details on Facebook Chat revealed weeks ahead of schedule in the clip below.
Fortune magazine, ever servile, provides a ready platform for the powerful with something to say. The latest on stage: Jim Breyer, the Accel Partners VC with a seat on Facebook's board. Breyer has a fair point: We may be seeing the cyclical bursting of another Silicon Valley bubble. Breyer says this happens once every seven years, roughly. But his timing is suspicious. Last October, Breyer gladly took Microsoft's bubbly $240 million for a microscopic stake in Facebook. Declaring the bursting of a bubble now may help hasten its advent, and in the process, make it harder for Facebook's rivals to raise money. But for Fortune readers' tech-stock portfolios, an early warning might have been more useful. Why didn't the magazine ring him up last fall? Fortune never mentions this. (Illustration by Sean McCabe for Fortune)
I've never used, or even felt anything approaching ZOMG until I heard that Facebook was launching a chat program. According to Wiktionary, ZOMG is an "overzealous typo of OMG, resulting from the proximity of z to the shift key." That sort of reminds me of the Facebook group, "I Prematurely Release The Shift Key!!1", whose members are "interested in earning big $$4."
It's so hard to reach out to people these days. How can I connect? I only have a cell phone, email, gchat, AIM, a personal website, Facebook and MySpace. But good news: Facebook is launching FBChat in two weeks. Finally, another medium for witty inside jokes! If you Facebook messages are primarily for getting laid, FBChat has the potential to spread crabs through UC Davis like whoa. Video demonstration after the jump.
Stanford is a school that's easy to love to hate — exclusive, expensive, and incredibly successful. The school has 94 NCAA national championships, in a wide variety of sports that most Americans could care less about, like track and swimming. Tech flack Mark McClennan just handed them the 2008 championship in a field most Americans could care less about, social networking. Comparing the ratio of students and alumni registered with their school to the number of students currently enrolled, Stanford rose to the top of the bracket, beating tiny Davidson (alma mater of my colleague Nicholas Carlson) in the finals. The reaction from the bleachers? Yawns. Because the Cardinals still suck at football. (Photo by AP/Kevork Djansezian)
Facebook will launch Facebook Chat, a Web-based IM system built into Facebook, in the coming weeks, flack Meredith Chin confirmed today. There go startup Social.im's hopes for an acquisition. Chin wouldn't share any more details. (You should. Leaks are good for business, remember.) She also said Facebook would introduce new privacy updates tomorrow, including an option to allow "friends of friends" to share information. I'll start. 25/m/NY.
The West Bank is fucked. I mean, I can barely follow what's going on right there what with the market crash and Eliot Spitzer's mistress, but I'm sure something is happening there and it's terrible. For one, Jewish settlers in the West Bank were being automatically listed as residents of "Palestine." How dare Facebook project its conception of Israeli-Palestine relations onto to their users' virtual identity? For shame. Now users in major settlement blocs can choose between listed as residents of Israel or Palestine. Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg consulted Dennis Ross on this matter. [Reuters]
At South By Southwest, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company doesn't "want to be in the business of deciding who's a country." And yet, inescapably, it is — right down to drawing borders. Facebook classified some West Bank towns as being in Palestine instead of Israel. This angered some Jewish settlers who wanted to be classified as living in Israel. On the other side of the fence, some Palestinians want East Jerusalem to be listed as part of Palestine. Facebook, in an effort to stay neutral, Facebook has given users the option of choosing which country they wish to identify with. We're just waiting for the Zionist-conspiracy wingnuts to notice that Zuckerberg is Jewish.
