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13 Feb 2012 15:26

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Culture: Having too many Facebook friends can make you depressed

  • 354Facebook friends ought to be your limit source
  • » There’s nothing wrong with denying that friend request: A recent study presented at the annual Society for Personality and Social Psychology meeting asked a group of participants to check their friend’s status updates. After doing so, they rated their lives as “much less satisfying” than a group that didn’t check their news feed. They looked at how many friends the users had, and found that 354 friends was roughly the point at which reading status updates started making them sad. The theory is that status updates often paint a disproportionately positive picture of peoples’ lives. Readers of said updates compare their own lives to those represented in status updates, and figure that they’re having a lot less fun than everybody else. The solution, then, is to either clean up your friends list, or befriend a bunch of depressed misanthropes.

03 Feb 2012 17:04

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Biz: Mark Zuckerberg won’t enjoy his tax bill after Facebook goes public

  • $1.5 billion in taxes for the Zuck after Facebook’s IPO source
  • » Why? Zuck plans to sell some of his shares: Back in 2005, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg received a set of new stock options for his company. With said company looking to  go public, Zuckerberg will exercise those shares before the IPO, effectively buying them at the price they were worth back then, and sell them after the IPO, effectively setting himself up for a windfall of nearly $5 billion … and one of the largest tax bills in history. It’s not like he’s gonna be broke, though — in fact, he’ll still be worth $24 billion by the end of it, much of that invested in his company. So hard for him, gotta tell you guys.

28 Jan 2012 20:53

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Biz: Greedy investment bankers won’t carve Facebook’s IPO too heavily

  • what Investment banks looking to get in on the upcoming Facebook IPO, expected to be filed for next week, may only take a 1 percent underwriting fee on the stock offering. How abnormal is that? Usually, the investment banking underwriters take 5 to 7 percent.
  • why Simply put, Facebook is such a big deal that the competition is extremely high for it; underwriting it is seen as a prestige move. “The Facebook IPO will be iconic,” notes one investment banker who says that Facebook gets to set the rules on this one. source

29 Nov 2011 00:37

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Tech: Aw, Zucks. We’re hoping this won’t “poke” our portfolios too badly.

  • Want to own a piece of Facebook? You might be able to in the spring of 2012. It looks like, despite founder Mark Zuckerberg’s well-known resistance to the idea over the years, the company is on its way to its “initial public offering” — the sale of stock that a private company makes available to the public. (Groupon just had an IPO, and it hasn’t been going quite so well for them.) The social media trailblazers could raise as much as $10 billion from first-day stock sales; that would put the company’s total value at $100 billion. Not bad for a guy who screwed over most of his friends from Harvard (and a couple of Winklevi) to get there. source

12 Oct 2011 11:26

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Tech: The Winklevi’s cost of suing Facebook? Possibly not worth it

  • $65 million the amount Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss earned from their original settlement with Facebook
  • $13 million the amount the Winklevi have spent on lawyer fees in that case and a couple of others source
  • » Twenty percent of their settlement, down the toilet: Sure, the prize that the Winklevi could win from Mark Zuckerberg and company could possibly be massive — in the billions, even — but the thing is, they’re already rich and they’ve wasted much of their “I’m rich” money on courtrooms and lawsuits. Perhaps not the most efficient way of spending the money? Maybe.

24 Jun 2011 11:28

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Tech: The Winklevi plan to sue Mark Zuckerberg AGAIN. Seriously.

Dear Winklevi: You have $65 million. Why start up ANOTHER lawsuit, anyway? You guys are like 30. This happened like eight years ago. You won. Why do this to yourselves? source

19 Jun 2011 22:24

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Tech: That guy who claims he owns Facebook passed a lie detector test

  • Paul Ceglia, 1. Lie detector, 0. Despite the fact that, you know, courts routinely ignore evidence from lie detectors and the Supreme Court doesn’t require the admission of polygraph evidence in court cases, the guy who claims that he owns most of Facebook says that he isn’t lying about his claims — and has the lie detector test results to prove it. “I respectfully suggest that Mark Zuckerberg undergo the same polygraph examination I have in order to expose who is really telling the truth,” says Paul Ceglia, who took the test June 11. Facebook’s lawyers want Ceglia to release the original copy of the contract immediately for testing — which Ceglia’s lawyers don’t want to do unless Zuckerberg’s boys come up with some evidence of their own. Do you guys think a lie detector test should be allowable evidence in this case? source
 

20 May 2011 17:08

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Tech: Facebook for kids? Mark Zuckerberg wants to start ’em young

  • Because of the restrictions we haven’t even begun this learning process. If they’re lifted then we’d start to learn what works. We’d take a lot of precautions to make sure that they [younger kids] are safe.
  • Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg • Explaining his frustrations with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which only allows children age 13 and older to use his service. He wants to make social media happen for children, too — for educational reasons. At this week’s NewSchools Summit in California, Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook had huge educational potential for young children. “Education is clearly the biggest thing that will drive how the economy improves over the long term,” he said. “We spend a lot of time talking about this.” Given the wariness that many already have towards Facebook as a social tool for kids, we don’t know how far Zuck’s pipe dream will go. But he is serious about education — last year, he gave $100 million to the troubled Newark school district. Let’s just say that he’ll have a lot of work ahead of him. source

01 Mar 2011 01:13

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Tech: Facebook: Yeah, we’re planning to give out your personal info

  • YES Facebook will share your address with 3rd parties source

20 Feb 2011 12:55

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World: A girl named “Facebook”: Egyptian family shows their gratitude

  • ‘Facebook’ received many gifts from the youth who were overjoyed by her arrival and the new name. A name [Facebook] that shocked the entire world.
  • An article from Al-Ahram • Revealing that an Egyptian family had named their newborn girl “Facebook.” We’re guessing that Mark Zuckerberg didn’t expect this to happen when he was sitting around his dorm room, trying to think up an elaborate way to meet girls and screw over the Winklevi. Which goes against the company’s whole stay-out-of-this-mess mantrasource