Social Media

A new study from New York securities firm NYPPEX estimates Facebook’s enterprise value is now much higher than Yahoo and EBay, at $41.2 billion and significantly higher than other fast growing startups like LinkedIn, Twitter, Zynga, and Groupon. Facebook’s value has shot up 56 percent since the middle of 2010. None of the startups mentioned above have gone public but many let their employees sell shares in private markets as an incentive for their valued staff members. The private markets let investors buy a piece of a company early on but it is difficult to determine what the price of a share should be. ...

Earlier this year I received a Facebook invite in my Yahoo! Mail account from none other than Angelina Jolie herself. I kid you not. While it’s true that we live in the Digital Age where communicating with anyone is a mere tap of a finger away—whether it’s via email, IM, Facebook, Twitter, etc.—the chances that Ms. Jolie would randomly reach out to a regular Joe, such as myself, is still pretty darn improbable. So, the following questions raced through my mind: ...

Former U.S. President George W. Bush’s book tour will stop at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto on Monday, with the social networking site announcing a “Facebook Live” event for 5 p.m. ET / 2 p.m. PT. Bush has been making the media rounds over the past several weeks, appearing on The Today Show, Oprah and The Tonight Show among other programs to talk about his memoir “Decision Points.” ...

David McCandless recently gave a presentation about data visualization in which he unveiled this graph, which tracked 10,000 Facebook status updates to determine precisely when people in relationships broke up. The results look like this: Note the huge surges around Spring Break, the beginning of Summer, and two weeks before Christmas, as well as the sharp decline on Christmas Day itself. The majority of the breakups are announced on Mondays (Garfield was right – lasagna is awesome. Non sequitor.) The graph also doesn’t show what happens when someone in a relationship makes a detailed graph about ending relationships, but I’m guessing that’s been an instant breakup one out of one times. ...

On average, response times and availability of five major social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and MySpace) has improved this past quarter, according to Web analytics company AlertSite. This is great news given that all of them (save for possibly MySpace) have a quickly growing number of users. Despite a few outages, however, Facebook is still the fastest social network in terms of average response time. In the most recent third quarter (July 1 to September 30), Facebook shaved 0.02 seconds off its second quarter average response time, down to 1.00 seconds. Twitter and Myspace came in the last two spots with average response times of 2.93 seconds and 3.61 seconds, respectively. That being said, Twitter’s performance improved the most over the last quarter among the social networks studied: more than 35 percent. ...

Facebook has extended its “Gross National Happiness” prototype app to 18 new countries. The app analyzes words in status updates like “awesome” or “tragic” to track changes in the collective emotional state of its users. When Facebook applied the methods to its U.S. userbase last year, it found that happiness went way up on holidays and way down when celebrities like Michael Jackson or Heath Ledger passed away. While the results of the study weren’t surprising, the idea of using status updates to measure national happiness was a novel one. ...

Spam emails such as the one below have been doing the rounds on the Internet hoping to lure recipients into downloading a Facebook toolbar. If you download the file by clicking on “Download Here”, you’ll see a file with the icon shown below: If you take a closer look at the icon, “darkSector” is shown inside of it. How strange. Is this actually a Facebook toolbar? Let’s take a look at the property of the file since the file looks a bit fishy. In the file properties, you’ll see the following in the Details tab. ...

A group of Second Life users is suing Second Life’s creator over a virtual land dispute. They say their contractual property ownership rights have been changed and that this alteration of the terms of service constitutes fraud and violates California consumer protection laws. Before you scoff too much at this seemingly ludicrous lawsuit, remember that virtual worlds aren’t just “funny money” and avatars. They’re serious business, both for the owners and investors who profit from them and for the users who pump hundreds and even thousands of dollars each into creating characters and interacting online. ...

If you’re one of those people who scribbles your plans for a given week on the back of the junk mail in your purse (totally not me…), then you could probably benefit from MySpace’s new platform. Today, MySpace continues on its quest to distinguish itself as a place for entertainment and socializing with the addition of what is essentially a calendar that combines your events, your friends’ events, concerts and shindigs put on by your favorite artists and even events from your Facebook account. You can also buy concert tix from band pages and pages of other entertainers. ...