Facebook took its first steps toward going public this week, and observers think its valuation might be as much as $100 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, its founder, owns 28 percent of the company, so that would instantly making him one of the 10 or 15 richest individuals in America. In this essay from October, 2010, I considered how much credit Zuckerberg deserves for social networking phenomenon that has led to his incredible success. Read full article > >

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Repost: Did social networking need Facebook?

Facebook will begin the process of becoming a publicly-listed company this week, valuing the social networking site at between $75bn and $100bn, reports suggest.

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Facebook ‘prepares to go public’

As a flood of family photos, videos and holiday greetings hits the Internet this time of year, online users will be swarming the social networking and photo-sharing sites that have become the personal scrapbooks of our time. But in the shaky and often promiscuous business of the Web, where companies fold and merge at astonishing speed, you can’t always trust that those sites will take long-term care of your digital treasures. Read full article > >

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As Web sites come and go, so too could the information you entrust them with

A data-driven culture, which has been at the root of Zynga’s success, could become a serious liability, several former senior employees warn.

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DealBook: Zynga’s Tough Culture Risks a Talent Drain

At the chaotic intersection of college football, social networking and billion-dollar commerce, there arrived late Wednesday afternoon a moment unlike any in the history of the University of Maryland football team: Randy Edsall, the Terrapins’ head coach, took to his Twitter account to announcewhich uniform combination, out of 32 possibilities, the team will wear Saturday afternoon against West Virginia. Read full article > >

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College football uniforms are getting more outrageous, thanks to Nike, Under Armour

The demand for Pandora underscores the market’s heady exuberance for consumer Internet companies.

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DealBook: Pandora Prices Its I.P.O. at $16 a Share

At what point do we decide that a political system has become decadent? The breaking point for me was the Anthony Weiner story , not just or even primarily for what he did but because it came at the end of what old Thomas Jefferson might call “a long train of abuses.” You really do wonder what’s happening to our democracy and those who serve it. The Weiner circus is bad enough. Social networking has taken us where human nature always threatens to go: downward. Do we want to give politicians incentives to limit their thinking to 140 characters? Will Weiner’s experience — and former congressman Chris Lee’s adventures on Craigslist — encourage politicians to question whether constituents want anything close to the level of detail about their lives that fans expect from pop stars and marquee athletes? Read full article > >

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Anthony Weiner and the tweet road to oblivion

It’s becoming clearer and clearer: Facebook will always find a way to tag those embarrassing photos of you. The security firm Sophos on Tuesday issued a warning to the social networking site about the new facial recognition software launched in…

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Facebook Enables Facial Recognition Technology

Facebook pushed the privacy line again by automatically turning on a feature that enables facial recognition in photos on the Web site.

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Bits: Facebook Changes Privacy Settings to Enable Facial Recognition

French TV and radio presenters have been banned from mentioning social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter on air.

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French media tweet and poke ban

Dead Russian soldiers tell tales of brutality on social networking site

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Fallen comrades

A Scottish newspaper names a footballer accused of being linked to a privacy injunction by users of social networking website Twitter.

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Paper names Twitter claims player

LinkedIn, the social networking site for professionals, will enter the stock market at the high end of expectations, offering its first shares at $45 each. That puts the internet company at a value of $9.3 billion-impressive for a company that made…

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LinkedIn Valued at $9.3 Billion

It seems you cannot escape from it all even on the top of the world. A mountaineer has posted a message on the social networking site Twitter from Everest’s summit.

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VIDEO: 3G network reaches top of Everest

Math nerds used to do math. Then, Wall Street started snapping them up to turn them into “quants,” who combed market data looking for tradeable trends. Now, Silicon Valley is taking these same brains and applying their skills to consumer data on the Internet, argues Bloomberg BusinessWeek ‘s Ashlee Vance in a probing feature this week. He’s even got a name for these new people: Wants. “At social networking companies, Wants may sit among the computer scientists and engineers, but theirs is the central mission: to poke around in data, hunt for trends, and figure out formulas that will put the right ad in front of the right person,” Vance writes. “Wants gauge the personality types of customers, measure their desire for certain products, and discern what will motivate people to act on ads.” Vance’s story has a second prong beyond coining her clever new term. He also argues that this technology bubble (if that’s what it is) will be different from previous ones because what the Wants are doing isn’t fundamentally valuable or extensible. The anti-Want in Vance’s narrative is my college friend and Big Data aficionado Jeff Hammerbacher. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” Hammerbacher told Vance. “That sucks.” He left Facebook several years ago and cofounded Cloudera , a firm that helps people analyze massive amounts of information across a wide variety of industries. It’s an infrastructural company. It’s clear to me that what Big Data guys do is important, but I think Vance undersells the Wants a little. Here’s why. Vance mentions the science and technology studies concept of the general-purpose technology, which we generally think of as the big stuff — steam engines, turbines, Internet routers. But it’s the consumer-applications that those things enabled which made at least the latter two so important. Take the electric power plant. Without all the consumer-focused companies making electric toasters and radios and telephones and lightbulbs, there would not have been the demand for electricity that drove the scaling up and improvement of power plants. The consumer and infrastructural components of the electrical system formed a virtuous (or not so virtuous, as you may see it) cycle that drove up electricity usage and plant technology. Who is to say that the Wants and their consumer-focused employers aren’t playing a similar role? So, sure, it may be that the Wants themselves don’t leave behind much technology to build on. Luckily, they may have a more important legacy: they’ll have gotten the entire world hooked on the Internet.

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The Rise of the Wants, Silicon Valley’s Answer to Wall Street’s Math Nerds