News surfaced yesterday that a sovereign wealth fund representing the Chinese government wants to buy a substantial amount of Facebook stock. According to anonymous sources to Business Insider, China wants to own enough of Facebook "to matter."
What does that mean? It is important to note that a sovereign wealth fund may represent a government but is not the actual government, as Business Insider reporter Nicholas Carlson points out. Is China's interest in Facebook a simply a government-sponsored group of venture capitalists looking to get a piece of the upcoming Facebook IPO or is there something more complicated at work behind the scenes?
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In the same report, Business Insider notes that Citibank is trying to acquire as much as $1.2 billion worth of Facebook stock on behalf of two sovereign wealth funds from China and the Middle East.
Facebook's user demographics are 70% international, according to the company's statistics page. China has a booming social media industry and U.S. companies are eyeing China as the next great frontier for expansion. Bloomberg reported in May that CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg disagree on whether or not the company should get into China, with Sandberg believing that Facebook would have to compromise its values to enter the People's Republic while Zuckerberg believes it could be "an agent of change" - and is likely seeing dollars signs as well.
It has been very difficult for U.S. Web companies to make a significant dent in the Chinese market. Twitter was banned in 2009 and Google has had a long, difficult road in the country. Zuckerberg has the final say when it comes to Facebook's involvement in China and as a private company it has the choice of who gets to buy stock. Zuckerberg may be thinking that if he lets a sovereign wealth fund representing the Chinese government buy a non-voting piece of the company, the barrier for entry (and success) would be lower than it would be for other U.S. Web companies.
Facebook's role in the Arab Spring shows that social media can be a powerful force for change. China is the global leader in Web censorship. It seems like the two entities would have a hard time existing in the same Internet space.
An inverse of Facebook in China would be the coming of Chinese micro-blogging platform Weibo to the English-speaking world. Weibo, run by Chinese corporation Sina, will continue to be self-censored even in English. Facebook would likely be asked by the Chinese government to alter its platform to provide some type of self-censoring within the country as well. If Chinese interests control $1.2 billion worth of the company (a small piece in comparison with the $100 billion valuation Facebook is expected to have upon IPO), Facebook is obligated to listen, even if the Chinese party does not have a vote on the Facebook board.
That could be what owning enough of Facebook "to matter" could mean. Enough that when the Chinese government talks, Zuckerberg is forced to listen. Censorship would likely ensue.
How far can China's censorship reach? Is this a money grab by some motivated Chinese business people or a preemptive strike by the Chinese government to control Facebook before it can cause the same type of disruption that was part of the Arab Spring?
In the midst of all the Google Plus hype last week, Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg dropped in an interview with reporters that the company is going to announce "something awesome" this week. The statement was cryptic and a giant tease to tech reporters looking for the next big story. Now Facebook has to live up to the words of its CEO and actually deliver something awesome.
Awesome is a pretty subjective word. What could be awesome to Zuckerberg could be lame to the rest of the world. What could that be? Powers of deduction around the rumor mill have pointed to some type of Skype integration with Facebook. Zuckerberg made his comments at the Seattle Facebook office. Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond are 15 miles from Seattle. Microsoft was an early investor in Facebook and has had a good relationship with the company. Microsoft bought Skype not long ago. Do all these signs lead to Skype integration within Facebook connected with a guiding hand from Microsoft? Or is it something else entirely, like new photo-sharing tools or an HTML5 application store? Let's take a look at the rumors to see what kind of awesomeness could be released in Palo Alto, Calif. tomorrow.
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Facebook & Skype
Back in September 2010, it appeared that Facebook and Skype were ready to announce "a deep integration partnership" that would bring Facebook the type of communications tools enjoyed by Google such as browser-integrated video chat. For some reason, that deal was never closed. At the time it looked like Skype would enable Facebook users to call and SMS their friends from Skype but the rumors made no mention of being able to video chat with friends from within the Facebook ecosystem in the browser. The ability to embed Skype directly into Facebook would certainly be a killer feature.
Google Plus has an exciting feature called Hangouts that allows up to 10 people to video chat in the same room. When it comes to real-time communications on the Internet, that is a powerful new tool. Will Skype integration into Facebook reach that level of "awesome?"
iPad Application, HTML5 Mobile Web Apps
According to Reuters, the 40-person Facebook team in Seattle has a background in mobile development. Does that mean that Facebook is finally going to release an iPad app or something similar in the mobile realm?
An iPad app does not seem like something that would fall into the "awesome" category. If Facebook was serious about an iPad application, it would have developed one by now, 15 months after the release of the original Apple tablet. A source tells TechCrunch that the announcement will not be an iPad app.
Facebook could still be going after the mobile realm though by releasing an HTML5 version of its platform that would be specifically designed for smartphones and tablets. Would that be the so-called "Project Spartan" that reportedly will try to create an application model to undercut iTunes? Maybe, though reports said that Project Spartan would not be available till mid-July at the earliest.
New Photo-Sharing Tools
When it comes to mobile photo sharing, Google Plus beats Facebook without a doubt. Yet, Facebook could be working on upgrading its photo-sharing tools that utilize sensor data on a device. If the Facebook team in Seattle is really a mobile-first operation, this might make sense. Facebook would like to create more connections using implicit data and as such creating a team of developers to emulate and add upon the ideas of photo-sharing app Color would make a lot of sense. Facebook + photo sharing + implicit data would probably fall into the category of "awesome." This may or may not be another aspect of Spartan.
Facebook could also update its photo-sharing capabilities in the same rollout. Improvements to Facebook's mobile uploads would be the ability to upload more than one photo at a time (or enabling "instant upload" the way Google Plus does) that could easily be shared with specific groups of people on Facebook but not the entire user stream.
We will be covering Facebook's announcement tomorrow at 10 a.m. PST. What do you think? What kind of awesomeness do you want from Facebook? What do you think Facebook will announce on Wednesday? Let us know in the comments.
Facebook may have recently reached the 750 million user mark, but not every single one of the social networking giant's members are necessarily in it for the long haul. Whether because of a concern about privacy, a need to tame their digital distractions or for some other reason, many users would prefer to leave the site and shut down their profile for good.
The trouble is, Facebook really, really doesn't want you to leave. Rather than providing users with an easily accessible "delete" button in their account settings, they instead offer the option to "deactivate" one's profile, which essentially makes it disappear until one log back in, at which point the profile is restored as though nothing ever happened.
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As anybody who's attempted to deactive their Facebook profile knows, the company throws up yet another small roadblock by piling on a massive guilt trip in which they display pictures of friends and family and emphasize just how badly all of those people will miss you.
For those who want to actually delete their Facebook account, there is a way, even if they don't make it easy to find.
Back Up Your Facebook Data First
Even for users who have sworn off Facebook for life, there's likely still some valuable content stored in the account, especially for those who have used the site for a few years. Wall posts, photos, videos and private messages have accumulated and you probably don't want to lose those.
Fortunately, Facebook offers an easy way to download your entire profile and its content into a ZIP file containing images and HTML files, which can be viewed locally in your Web browser. The link to download this back-up file can be found by going to Account (in the upper right corner of the page), clicking on Account Settings and then scrolling down to "Download Your Information."
Delete Your Profile
Once you've got everything backed up and you've overcome the crippling guilt Facebook lays on, you're ready to delete your profile and account.
As mentioned, that button is not located in the settings, but rather is buried deep within the site's FAQ. You can access the profile deletion button here. But beware, as the page notes, this action cannot be undone and will permanently delete your profile data. If you're okay with that, go ahead and click the blue "submit" button.
Should you ever change your mind and want to start a new profile, you can easily do so. It doesn't look like Facebook is going anywhere anytime soon.
George Hotz, also known as "GeoHot" on the Internet, is now working at Facebook, the company confirms. Hotz is best known for both his iPhone hacking skills and as the person who jailbroke and reverse engineered Sony's PlayStation 3, leading to legal battles. In April, Sony announced it reached a settlement with Hotz, with Hotz agreeing to a permanent injunction against publishing any further code.
The following month, Hotz was hired at Facebook.
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Hacker's New Day Job
Reportedly, Hotz began work at Facebook as a software engineer in May 2011 and his first day was May 9. A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed the hire but did not provide any other details regarding Hotz' position or duties.
The news was reported by TechUnwrapped and others over the weekend, citing an interview with Chronic-Dev Team member Joshua Hill (aka "P0sixninja on Twitter). The Chronic-Dev Team, for those unaware, is a group of developers who work to release software for jailbreaking iPhones and other iOS devices.
In a video interview (see embed below), Hill discussed the upcoming jailbreakers' convention known as MyGreatFest, During the chat, Hill also mentioned that he recently challenged Hotz to find an exploit for the iPad 2, but Hotz turned him down due to his current employment at Facebook, as well as his desire to escape the limelight after his legal troubles with Sony.
Additional confirmation came from Gabe Rivera, founder of the tech news aggregator Techmeme. He did a little sleuthing of his own and discovered that Hotz had announced his employment at Facebook via his Facebook profile. According to this post (viewable by Hotz' Facebook friends and network only), he began in May and revealed the news to friends in June.
Facebook has yet to officially confirm Hotz' role with the company, only his hire, but speculation has it that he may be involved with Facebook's mobile efforts, specifically its upcoming iPad app. The New York Times reported earlier this month that the iPad app, in development for nearly a year, may only be weeks away from release.
Facebook is now "getting serious about music and media," writes Om Malik on GigaOm.com, revealing unannounced details regarding the social network's new ambition to be a place to discover music with friends. The deal involves partnerships with the internationally popular music streaming service Spotify, and possibly other music services, too, currently in talks with Facebook.
Sharing music with friends? Sounds like the final death knell for MySpace, doesn't it?
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Facebook Music Revealed
According to Malik, there will be deep integration of music into the social networking site, including a prominent link on the left-side of the screen alongside other popular destinations like "Photos," "Friends," "Places," "Groups," "Deals," "Pages" and "Games." Clicking the link will open up a music dashboard where users will be able to stream songs from Facebook's music service partners.
On this page, you'll see recommended songs from your friends, notifications of which friends listened to your recommendations, top songs and albums among your friends, recent listens from friends and a "happening now" ticker showing real-time information about the music your friends are presently playing.
Also included in the Facebook music roll-out will be a persistent playback and pause button at the bottom of the page, next to the chat icon. When you mouse over the button, you can see what's playing, and pause or play tracks.
The integrations, as described, sound like an obvious next step for the word's largest social networking service, as music is often a social experience. But oddly, it's been an area Facebook has historically avoided. Outside of third-party applications, there has not been a "Facebook Music" experience offered to the site's over half-a-billion users. That may soon change, it appears, if this report is true.
Killing MySpace at Last, Maybe Even Apple's Ping
The news comes at a time when Facebook's one-time competitor, the music-focused MySpace, is struggling to find a buyer. While MySpace's time has clearly passed, it was, at one time, the place where many people learned about bands, artists, and even recommendations from friends, albeit the latter often through the use of blaring, auto-playing tracks that bombarded you upon visits to a friend's glitzy profile page. With Facebook, the integration sounds better planned, even subtler in some ways. It's there for those who want music to be a part of their Facebook experience, but can be safely ignored by those who don't.
According to Malik, the music service will build on several of Facebook's core strengths - Facebook Connect, which allows users to log into external services using their Facebook ID and password, the now ubiquitous "like" button which may be used for "liking" shared tracks or bands, and, of course, the connections between friends.
Facebook's music service has the potential to succeed where Apple's own version of social music sharing, the iTunes service known as "Ping," has famously failed. With Facebook integration pulled at the last minute because Apple couldn't agree to Facebook's "onerous terms," Ping, not surprisingly, has failed to gain traction. Social, apparently, was an area where Apple should have realized how critical the Facebook integration truly was - Apple needed Facebook, but it seemed to think it was the other way around.
Now Facebook is stepping in to trounce both Ping and MySpace while avoiding having to deal with record labels itself, a battle it leaves up to its music partners. It's a formula that will likely work, further solidifying Facebook's status at the only social network you need, even if what you need is to hear some new music.
Online social networking sites have oftenbeen accusedof separating people from the real world, and providing them with the illusion of connection through virtual relationships which aren't the equivalent of their offline counterparts. But that's not actually the case, a new study says. Facebook users actually have more close relationships than non-users, and are more trusting, more politically engaged and get more social support than other Internet users.
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The study, performed by Pew Internet and American Life Project, asked 2,255 Americans about their social networking habits. The answers challenge earlier beliefs held by some that social networking via the Internet leads to a separation from real world relationships and real-world concerns, and can even cause isolation.
How People Use Social Networking Sites and Facebook
According to Pew, out of the 79% of American adults using the Internet, nearly half (47%) use at least one social networking website. 92% of these social networking users are on Facebook, 29% on MySpace, 18% are on LinkedIn and 13% use Twitter.
While those percentages seem to imply popularity, that's not the case. By measuring engagement alone, Facebook and Twitter come out on top, with 52% and 33% of users logging on daily, respectively, compared with 7% who visit MySpace daily and 6% who do the same on LinkedIn.
On Facebook in particular, participation, as opposed to passive consumption, appears to be a common trend. 15% of users update their status on an average day, 22% comment on another's post or status, 20% comment on others' photos, 26% "like" another user's content and 10% send a private message to a friend.
Results of Regular Use: Real Friendships, Emotional Support
This daily use and engagement leads to generally positive feelings among Facebook users, specifically in how they perceive their relationships with others, and the world around them. Facebook users who use the site multiple times per day are 43% more likely than other Internet users to be trusting of others - that is, they feel that most people can be trusted. It's your typical "glass half full" outlook on life.
Regular Facebook users are also, on average, 9% more close to their friends than other Internet users. And they score higher when it comes to social support than other online users. Pew says they are 5 points higher in total support, 5 points higher in emotional support and 5 points higher in companionship than Internet users with similar demographics. (More study details can be found here).
The study also showed a general increase in the use of social networking services to stay in touch with close friends. In 2008, only 29% of users said they had friended all of their core "confidants." Today, that number is 40%.
Users tend to revive their "dormant" relationships (high school friend requests, anyone?), too, and these can become important sources of information, even though they're not active relationships.
Finally, Facebook users are more engaged with politics, no doubt thanks to the numerous political conversations that occur online via status updates and political cause pages.
Conclusions
What this study shows, says Pew, is that there is little validity to claims that people who use social networking sites have smaller social networks, less closeness with others or are exposed to less diversity. In other words, your Facebook friends are real friends because Facebook allows you to mirror your offline connections via the Internet, it does not isolate you from them. It may even enable you to have more close ties, with frequent use.
That said, the study fell short of concluding that it's Facebook itself that's actually causing people have these types of close relationships, support networks or impacting their engagement levels with various causes. Americans with deficits in these areas, and who are closed off to other viewpoints, untrusting of others and disengaged with their community and society are not like this because of how they use technology. Instead, these deficits may stem from other factors, like lower educational attainment.
There are reports that Facebook is coming out with a comprehensive new photo sharing application for the iPhone that will disrupt the entire iOS photo application ecosystem.
According to documents obtained by TechCrunch, the application is codenamed "Hovertown" or "WithPeople" and will incorporate the best features of the existing market leaders in the photosharing market such as Color (a technological leader, if not an actual market leader), Instagram and Path. The questions become: Is the app as innovative as its hype suggests? And how disruptive will it really be?
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Facebook's Push Into Implicit Social Data?
According to TechCrunch, the application will be built on top of Facebook's social graph. What will a photo application on top of the social network's explicit graph look like? If the rumors that it incorporates features from Color (the ability to see other users' photos from the location where you took it even if you do not know them), then the idea of Facebook stepping into surfacing data with an implicit social graph becomes a reality.
The idea of the implicit social graph is to make connections when those connections are not directly related to the subject. The ability to obtain this data becomes much easier on mobile platforms, such as iOS (which Facebook's new app will be built for), because smartphones have a variety of sensors that record location, wireless network information and the presence of other smartphones. Think of it like this: you take a picture with your new iPhone Facebook app and it will make a recommendation to friend somebody who has also taken a photo in that location. The goal would be to make implicit relationships explicit.
This is speculation, of course. But if you think about those aspects of Color, it would make sense for Facebook to target the acquisition of implicit data through mobile sensors and photos.
Community Creation and Privacy Concerns
Now, if you take Path and Instagram features, the idea would be to restrict the implicit data's relationship to the user and secure privacy. For instance, a friend recommendation would not be made just because two people took a picture in the same spot. Multiple implicit connections would have to be made for a recommendation to be triggered, so as to determine if the people live close to each other or if one is a local and the other is a tourist who just happened to take a picture while passing through.
Instagram's features revolve around community and photo filters. Facebook could add friend and location tagging to create implicit "groups" of people who take pictures in similar locations (with or without the filters that Instagram offers). Think of Flickr groups where like-minded people tag photos of similar subjects and locations and then make Facebook communities around those photos.
Disruptive or Not, It Will Be Huge
In terms of disruption, there are several limiting factors to Facebook's initiative, as reported by TechCrunch. The biggest would be that the verticals are restricted to iOS and Facebook. Those are big verticals, of course, but not everybody owns an iPhone or decides to share photos on Facebook (like me, for instance). Yet with six billion photo uploads per month and 100 billion photos being hosted by Facebook, any play that the social giant makes into mobile photo sharing will be an instant success and will create a great amount of user data that Facebook can utilize on top of its existing social graph.
There are reports that Facebook is coming out with a comprehensive new photo sharing application for the iPhone that will disrupt the entire iOS photo application ecosystem.
According to documents obtained by TechCrunch, the application is codenamed "Hovertown" or "WithPeople" and will incorporate the best features of the existing market leaders in the photosharing market such as Color (a technological leader, if not an actual market leader), Instagram and Path. The questions become: Is the app as innovative as its hype suggests? And how disruptive will it really be?
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Facebook's Push Into Implicit Social Data?
According to TechCrunch, the application will be built on top of Facebook's social graph. What will a photo application on top of the social network's explicit graph look like? If the rumors that it incorporates features from Color (the ability to see other users' photos from the location where you took it even if you do not know them), then the idea of Facebook stepping into surfacing data with an implicit social graph becomes a reality.
The idea of the implicit social graph is to make connections when those connections are not directly related to the subject. The ability to obtain this data becomes much easier on mobile platforms, such as iOS (which Facebook's new app will be built for), because smartphones have a variety of sensors that record location, wireless network information and the presence of other smartphones. Think of it like this: you take a picture with your new iPhone Facebook app and it will make a recommendation to friend somebody who has also taken a photo in that location. The goal would be to make implicit relationships explicit.
This is speculation, of course. But if you think about those aspects of Color, it would make sense for Facebook to target the acquisition of implicit data through mobile sensors and photos.
Community Creation and Privacy Concerns
Now, if you take Path and Instagram features, the idea would be to restrict the implicit data's relationship to the user and secure privacy. For instance, a friend recommendation would not be made just because two people took a picture in the same spot. Multiple implicit connections would have to be made for a recommendation to be triggered, so as to determine if the people live close to each other or if one is a local and the other is a tourist who just happened to take a picture while passing through.
Instagram's features revolve around community and photo filters. Facebook could add friend and location tagging to create implicit "groups" of people who take pictures in similar locations (with or without the filters that Instagram offers). Think of Flickr groups where like-minded people tag photos of similar subjects and locations and then make Facebook communities around those photos.
Disruptive or Not, It Will Be Huge
In terms of disruption, there are several limiting factors to Facebook's initiative, as reported by TechCrunch. The biggest would be that the verticals are restricted to iOS and Facebook. Those are big verticals, of course, but not everybody owns an iPhone or decides to share photos on Facebook (like me, for instance). Yet with six billion photo uploads per month and 100 billion photos being hosted by Facebook, any play that the social giant makes into mobile photo sharing will be an instant success and will create a great amount of user data that Facebook can utilize on top of its existing social graph.
According to a report from CNBC, Facebook is planning a Q1 2012 IPO which could be "pegged at north of $100 billion." The social networking company's IPO may be triggered by a section of the Securities and Exchange Act known as "the 500 rule" which states that a private company with over 500 investors must begin to release quarterly financial information to the SEC, just as public companies do, CNBC explains.
This news comes alongside a second report, which states that Facebook's growth is slowing down in certain key markets, including the U.S.
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IPO Planned, $100 Billion Valuation
The CNBC article cites "people familiar with the matter," when making its claims, but Facebook declined to comment to news outlets pursuing the story. However, we've known for some time that an IPO was in Facebook's near future. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said at a meeting last month that an IPO was "inevitable," notes CNBC.
Even as far back as September 2010, Facebook board member, venture capitalist and early investor Peter Thiel told reporters that Facebook was likely to go public in 2012. He, however, had pegged "late 2012" as the time frame for that.
Reports of Growth Slowdown
Facebook was also making news this week due to a separate report from Inside Facebook which states that the social network's growth has slowed down in the markets where it has been available the longest, most notably in the U.S. Here, a drop of nearly 6 million users was seen over the month of May, going from 155.2 million users to 149.2 million by month-end. Canada also fell by 1.52 million users, down to 16.6 million, while the United Kingdom, Norway and Russia all lost over 100,000 users each, during the same time.
Facebook responded to these claims, saying that:
From time to time, we see stories about Facebook losing users in some regions. Some of these reports use data extracted from our advertising tool, which provides broad estimates on the reach of Facebook ads and isn’t designed to be a source for tracking the overall growth of Facebook. We are very pleased with our growth and with the way people are engaged with Facebook. More than 50% of our active users log on to Facebook on any given day.”
In light of Facebook's response, Inside Facebook also compared its findings (which do come from direct measurements using Facebook's advertising tool) to other third-party services. While nothing matched up exactly, the general trends showed that in some of the social network's early adopting countries like the U.K. and Canada, gains and losses started in 2010, but growth up until then had been steady. In the U.S., fewer monthly users were seen at the beginning of the year by most of the third party services, and only one showed any growth in the disputed month of May.
Facebook Hasn't Peaked
Still, it's far too soon to say the social network has hit its peak, some experts say. In a report on PEHub, for example, social media analyst Lou Kerner of Wedbush Securities noted that the Inside Facebook report doesn't include data about increasing page views or frequency of visits, both of which help gauge the "vibrancy of a website." (Note: Kerner owns shares of Facebook).
And digital media analyst Greg Sterling said that he would need to see "at least three more months of hard, detailed data, to suggest that Facebook's best days are now behind it."
That said, Sterling still thinks the site may be vulnerable. "[Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg has characterized Facebook as a utility — a communications utility — but I’d argue that it hasn’t yet made itself into one the way that Google has,” Sterling told PEHub. "In the same same way that we joined Facebook because our friends did, we’re likely to leave if those same friends become less engaged, he says.
The data pointing to slowdowns is definitely questionable, we think. Even Inside Facebook reports that "a person close to the company" says the site is still growing in the U.S. And Facebook is on track to reach 700 million users, thanks to growth in newer markets.
Plus, there is still China, population 1.3 billion. Facebook may be planning to enter that market through a relationship with Chinese search company Baidu in order to launch a new, separate and more tightly controlled social networking service, which may or may not connect with Facebook as it exists today.
Facebook does not tag people in photos automatically, but prompts users to tag friends that the facial recognition system recognizes. The service is opt-out in Facebook's security settings as opposed to opt-in. That aspect of the facial recognition feature and Facebook's approach to privacy altogether is what bothers privacy and security advocates like Sophos.
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"Unfortunately, once again, Facebook seems to be sharing personal information by default," Graham Cluley wrote on the Sophos company blog, Naked Security. "Many people feel distinctly uncomfortable about a site like Facebook learning what they look like, and using that information without their permission."
Cluley wrote and open letter to Facebook in April this year, calling for the company to go to a "privacy by default" doctrine as opposed to a privacy via opt-out policy, which Facebook currently employs for much of its information.
Cluley also does not think that most people are mentally equipped to handle the long and sometimes confusing Facebook privacy settings.
"Most Facebook users still don't know how to set their privacy options safely, finding the whole system confusing," Cluley wrote. "It's even harder though to keep control when Facebook changes the settings without your knowledge."
When Facebook unveiled facial recognition last year, it was uploading 100 million pictures to the site a day, with a good portion of those including people (who are likely also Facebook users). Companies like Viewdle and ActiveSymbols are bringing facial recognition applications to smartphones. Divvyshot and founder Sam Odio were acquired by Facebook to help institute its facial recognition program.
For its part, Google chairman and former CEO, Eric Schmidt has said that Google will never get in to the facial recognition game. That has not stopped developers from building facial recognition into Android, such as the application Recognizr.
If you are concerned about facial recognition from Facebook, you can go into your privacy settings and change them. Click privacy settings - customize settings - things others share and disable the "suggest photos of me to friends" feature.
News surfaced yesterday that a sovereign wealth fund representing the Chinese government wants to buy a substantial amount of Facebook stock. According to anonymous sources to Business Insider, China wants to own enough of Facebook "to matter."
In the midst of all the 
Facebook may have recently reached the 750 million user mark, but not every single one of the social networking giant's members are necessarily in it for the long haul. Whether because of a concern about privacy, a need to tame their digital distractions or for some other reason, 
Facebook is now "getting serious about music and media," writes Om Malik on 
The news comes at a time when Facebook's one-time competitor, the music-focused MySpace, is 
Online social networking sites have 
This daily use and engagement leads to generally positive feelings among Facebook users, specifically in how they perceive their relationships with others, and the world around them. Facebook users who use the site multiple times per day are 43% more likely than other Internet users to be trusting of others - that is, they feel that most people can be trusted. It's your typical "glass half full" outlook on life.
According to a report from 
Facebook changed the security options of millions of international users today. The photo-tagging