Facebook IPO could be richest in tech history

By Richard Warnica - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 11:17 AM - 0 Comments

Facebook, founded in a Harvard dorm as a way to rank women, filed for an IPO Wednesday that values the social networking site between US$75 and $100 billion. The public offering is set to make millionaires and billionaires of early investors, employees, and even the guy who painted the walls at the company’s first Palo Alto, California office. Graffiti artist David Choe accepted company shares in lieu of cash for his work in 2005 despite thinking at the time that Facebook was a “ridiculous and pointless” idea. Those shares are now worth about $200 million, according to what the Times calls “a number of people who know Mr. Choe and Facebook executives.” (Someday, when Maclean’s Need To Know goes public, I hope you all, dear readers, are cited as people who know me.)

Documents released as part of the filing show founder Mark Zuckerberg still has near complete control of the company Aaron Sorkin seems to think he founded as a way to get back at an ex. Zuckerberg owns just over a quarter of the company’s shares, but controls more than 57 per cent of the voting stock. His mortality is also identified as one of the company’s major liabilities, according to the 400-page S-1 filing. Along with COO Sheryl Sandberg, he is listed as one of two “key personnel” whose loss could seriously damage the online behemoth. (Another big liability: privacy laws.)

Facebook shares have been trading in private sales for a few years and those who bought early are now set to make bank. Billionaire Peter Thiel invested $500,000 in the company in 2004. That stake could now be worth $2 billion. Zuckerberg’s dad, his college roommate, and U2 front man Bono are also set to cash in on early investments/fortuitous relationships. If the sale goes as planned, it will become the most valuable IPO in tech stock history, which is a remarkable fate for a site used mostly by former classmates who want to talk about their babies.

Washington Post

New York Times

The Atlantic Wire

Studies say: real friends matter, and the rich pollute

By Alex Ballingall - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 1:50 PM - 0 Comments

British Columbia: Being richer doesn’t always mean eating better. A new study out of the University of British Columbia found those living in Vancouver’s wealthiest neighbourhoods have the least accessibility to healthy, fresh food. As incomes rise, so does the average distance to food stores—which is the opposite of the situation in some U.S. cities, where many low-income areas are considered “food deserts.”

Alberta: Jimmy Kimmel recently pressed his audience to delete people from Facebook and focus on flesh-and-blood friends. The late-night TV host may be on to something. A University of Alberta study found that people with strong, real-world social lives are less stressed and better able to raise their kids, even when mired in financial hardship.

Manitoba: Even though the province has some of the highest obesity rates in the country, a recent University of Manitoba study found that obese people don’t significantly weigh down the provincial health system until they display “the very highest” body mass indexes. Even then, hospital visits and the taking of prescription drugs only increase by about 15 per cent. As the lead author put it, rising obesity is going to be “a bit of a burden, but it’s not going to be an avalanche.”

Ontario: Accused of insatiable greed and unjust political influence, the one per cent is also charged with over-contributing to global warming. A recent study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that the richest one per cent of households are responsible for greenhouse gas emissions three times higher than the national average, and six times higher than the poorest 10 per cent.

Quebec: A researcher at McGill University found a correlation between children’s ability to fib and the harshness with which they’re disciplined at school. When two groups of three- and four-year-olds from the same neighbourhood were compared, those in the more punitive atmosphere showed they could lie more convincingly.

Think you’re not on Facebook? Think again.

By Jesse Brown - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 11:52 AM - 8 Comments

Just because you ignore Facebook doesn’t mean Facebook is ignoring you. The group Europe vs Facebook has filed a complaint to the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, alleging that Facebook is breaking privacy laws by building “Shadow Profiles” of individuals who have never signed up with the social networking site.

It’s certainly true that Facebook collects information about non-users; whenever you use the site to invite off-site friends to join up, or when you invite them to events through email invites, Facebook, by necessity, is storing those addresses, at least long enough to send your pals an email. And whenever you sync your phone contacts or email address book to Facebook, the names, phone numbers, and email addresses of any non-FBing friends you may have are delivered to Facebook’s servers.

What we don’t know is what Facebook is doing with this info. Are they storing it indefinitely or destroying it? Are they compiling and aggregating it—matching an email address you typed in last year with a phone number you synced yesterday to a name you mentioned in today’s status update? Is Facebook mapping these individuals in a hidden social graph? Are they building an alleged network of “Shadow Profiles”? If so, why?

Facebook isn’t saying. The company provides no information on how it handles the non-member data it collects. Perhaps it’s time they cleared the matter up. After all, if you don’t have a Facbook profile by now, it’s probably because you made an active decision *not* to—it’s not like you’ve never heard of the the site. It’s just that you didn’t want them to hear about you.

Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown

Welcome to the Internet. No kids allowed

By Jesse Brown - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 3:50 PM - 2 Comments

If you’re under 13, you’re not allowed on Facebook.

That’s not the command of a strict parent—it’s Facebook policy. It also happens to be U.S. law. Thanks to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, it’s illegal for websites to collect the personal data of anyone under 13 without parental consent. Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to fight this law, but for now, Facebook won’t let you sign up unless you state your age as 13 or over, regardless of which country you live in.

Of course, Facebook is just one of the sites kids aren’t supposed to use. Just about every commercial website has small print in their TOU (Terms of Use) limiting access to those legally able to enter into binding contracts. In Canada, as in most countries, this means ages 18 and up. So if you’re a teenager who follows the rules, you can’t tweet, you can’t watch a YouTube video, and you can’t even run a Google search. Continue…

Caught in Facebook’s net

By Chris Sorensen - Friday, September 30, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 4 Comments

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of social networking giant Facebook, stepped onstage at a developers’ conference in San Francisco last week and, probably unwittingly, launched into his best Steve Jobs impression. Wearing jeans, sneakers and a grey T-shirt (the Apple Inc. chair favours black turtlenecks, but you get the idea), Zuckerberg took the wraps off a host of new Facebook features while peppering the presentation with Jobs-isms—“really easy” yet “so powerful”—that emphasized just how intuitive and exciting everything about the overhauled Facebook would be.

Except that none of the new features unveiled appear to be either—at least not at first blush. Once a relatively spartan piece of online real estate, users’ profile pages will now display a comprehensive “timeline” of their lives, curated in part by Facebook’s software and by users themselves, while a new window shows exactly what everyone in your network is doing at any given moment (Stephanie likes Peter’s status update, Lisa commented on her photo, Steve is friends with Sharon . . . and so on). Zuckerberg called it a place to monitor “lightweight” activity that threatens to bog down the main news feed, which will now consist entirely of material that is deliberately posted by a user’s friends.

Turns out there’s a reason Facebook decided to create a dedicated space for all of these auto-updates: it plans to unleash a torrent of them on its users. The company is planning to throw TV, streaming music and other online media services into the mix so that users can see, in real time, what songs their friends are listening to, which TV shows they’re watching and what news stories they are reading—and soon, no doubt, where they’re shopping. “What’s even more interesting and exciting than getting people signed up is all the things that are possible by having these connections in place,” said Zuckerberg, who suggested that Facebook and its partners will “rethink some industries.”

Continue…

Are Fiat’s new ads about its cars or Jennifer Lopez?

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 11:15 AM - 0 Comments

Chrysler Group

In the latest commercial for Italian carmaker Fiat, Jennifer Lopez cruises the streets in a cream-coloured Fiat 500 Cabrio convertible, dressed impeccably, while a mob of fans chases after her (whether they’re after Lopez or her car isn’t clear). Fiat couldn’t have picked a higher-watt star for their new ad campaign—with her recent divorce, Vanity Fair cover story, a new album out, and a recurring gig on American Idol, Lopez’s career is hotter than ever. But some observers worry Fiat’s ad campaign will alienate men, the auto industry’s traditional target consumers.

On Fiat U.S.A.’s Facebook page, some reviews have been scathing, with one commenter saying the ads risk turning the Cabrio into a “girls’ car.” Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Some reports suggest that, since the recession, more women are buying sports cars. As for Lopez, she’s got a new single to promote, which blares in the commercial’s background.

Fun: the missing new Facebook feature

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 3:32 PM - 12 Comments

It’s either Facebook or it’s me: one of us has lost the plot.

Like most people, I’m baffled by the new layout. The faux-Twitter feed with its annoying pop-up balloons, crammed in the top right corner, is apparently called the “Ticker.” It competes for my attention with a list of my online friends below. Some have green dots next to them, and some phone icons. Some suddenly pop up, demanding live text chats. Do I have a green dot? I haven’t a clue.

My traditional News Feed has changed–the friends I want to hear about seem to be gone, replaced by others Facebook has prioritized by some mysterious logic. Someone posted instructions on how to change this back, but I can’t remember who it was and what to search for. Between the News Feed and the Ticker (and isn’t the Ticker also a News Feed?), there are faces of strangers I am encouraged to “subscribe” to. What does that mean? Has “friending” become “subscribing”? Will they know I’ve subscribed to them? How about everyone else? Who has subscribed to me? Continue…

That’s ‘professor’ uptight to you

By Josh Dehaas - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 8 Comments

Photographs by Laura Mills

June Madeley is annoyed with the increasingly rude demands she gets from students at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John. Ten years ago, it was common for them to see her during office hours when they had a question. “Now there’s an expectation that we’ll answer their emails immediately and meet them whenever there’s a good time for them.” And as surely as the leaves pile up on campus each October, the communications professor knows her inbox will soon fill with complaints about mid-terms scheduled for the week after the Thanksgiving holiday. “There are a lot of people who feel they can’t make the exam because of travel arrangements,” she says. “And others who think it’s unfair that they have to study that weekend.”

But when Madeley gets frustrated, she doesn’t fire off a snotty email to the student. She logs on to “That’s ‘Professor’ Uptight to You, Johnny,” a Facebook group with 297 members, all of them teaching at universities and colleges. The members-only site is a place where university educators can vent in the form of steaming emails they wish they could write to their students but can’t because that would be, well, rude. Madeley, who says she hasn’t posted yet, enjoys reading the rants from her colleagues. The site is run by Khrystyne Keane, a Connecticut-based editor for a non-profit group, who took over its administration as a favour to a professor friend. The logo—a unicorn standing under a rainbow—is a jab at students, some of whom feel they are every bit as special as the fabled one-horned horse and the multicoloured arc.

The posts are all written to anonymous Janeys and Johnnies, but they share one trait: carefully crafted sarcasm. “Dear Johnny, I suspect that if you had spent as much time and effort on your last assignment as you did on the long flaming email you just sent me, this whole ‘conversation’ would never have happened,” reads one. “Dear Janey, I want to assure you that we didn’t do anything important in class. We just stared out the window for three hours in silence,” reads another.

Continue…

This is my best Facebook birthday ever

By Rebecca Eckler - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 6:50 AM - 1 Comment

Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Lauren Cattermole

Facebook has changed one really important date in people’s lives—maybe, for some, the most important date of the year. Thanks to the option of being able to wish people happy birthday on Facebook (your page shows reminders of the birthdays of “friends”), many users now receive hundreds upon hundreds of greetings on their big day. Granted, they may be from practical strangers, but Facebook users are basking in the glory of all the attention.

“Prior to birthdays being ‘pimped out’ on Facebook, which was after I graduated university, there were years and years where I didn’t receive many happy birthday wishes,” says Mindy Blackstien, founder and chief ambassador at BodyPROUD and creator of the Facebook group “It’s Time: Love Your Body! Be Body Proud.” Blackstien this year received “pages and pages and pages” of birthday greetings, some 400 or 500 notes on her wall.

“Because I did not often bring up my birthday in conversation, new people in my life didn’t know about it and others did not necessarily remember, except my family, and even that may have been primarily because my mom called to remind everyone,” Blackstien says. “So when Facebook started marketing it for me, a new energy was created.” The day of her birthday, March 16, and that whole week, became, she says, “meaningful in a different way. I found myself eagerly anticipating my birthday for Facebook reasons.”

Continue…

Good news, bad news: August 25-31, 2011

By macleans.ca - Monday, September 5, 2011 at 3:30 PM - 0 Comments

Good news

Manish Swarup/AP

Safe passage

Plans to build a 4,300-km pipeline between the Alberta oil sands and refineries in Texas will have “no significant” environmental impact, according to a U.S. State Department report. Although the controversial conclusion sparked a mini-protest outside the White House (a NASA scientist was among those arrested), the report confirms the obvious: America needs Canadian oil, and the Keystone XL pipeline is the safest way to get it there. The project will also create thousands of jobs on both sides of the border—an economic benefit that, unlike the environmental fears, is very real.

Tweaking social networks

Facebook beefed up its privacy settings last week, giving its 300 million users more streamlined control over who gets to see their personal photos. Britain, meanwhile, dropped a controversial proposal that would have granted police the power to arbitrarily shut down social networking sites in times of crisis. (The short-lived plan came after rioters in England used Twitter and Facebook to coordinate their mayhem.) Taken together, the decisions strike a fine but necessary balance in this age of tweets and pokes. Privacy is a right, but so is free speech.

Continue…

Facebook changes sharing controls

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 24, 2011 at 1:02 PM - 1 Comment

Facebook has announced sweeping changes to privacy control on the social networking website. Users can now approve or reject photos and posts that they are tagged in before the content shows up on their profiles. The move comes two months after Google launched Google Plus, a competing social networking site that allows selective content sharing within small groups. The changes will roll out in the “coming days,” according to Facebook.

CBC News

Anonymous morphs into a political movement

By Cigdem Iltan - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 2 Comments

Reuters/Lisi Niesner

Gone, for Anonymous, are the days of aimless Internet hijinks. The hacker group, once a loosely knit group of cyber-pranksters that formed in 2003, has traded prank pizza deliveries and shock humour for high-profile attacks on authoritarian regimes. The community now attracts both political activists and hackers alike to campaigns targeting everyone from Arab dictatorships to opponents of WikiLeaks.

Last week, Anonymous carried out its latest offensive on an Arab government, when hackers swapped content on the Syrian Ministry of Defence website with a message calling on protesters to take down President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which has killed an estimated 1,700 citizens since uprisings began five months ago. In June, the group claimed responsibility for revealing the passwords of hundreds of Bahraini, Egyptian, Moroccan and Jordanian government officials’ email accounts. And during the early stirrings of the Tunisian revolution in January, Anons (as the group’s adherents are known) created care packages that included instructions on how to conceal identities online and developed a script to help bloggers and news sources dodge a government-led phishing campaign. “It is simply impossible to list all countries that need help,” the maturing collective proclaimed on the @AnonymousIRC Twitter account on Aug. 9. “We try our best.”

Other recent targets include businesses that withdrew their services from WikiLeaks when, in December, the organization released secret diplomatic cables, and the Orlando, Fla., Chamber of Commerce, after members of the group Food Not Bombs were arrested for feeding the city’s homeless, against local laws. But the clandestine computer hacking group wasn’t always so interested in altruism. While Anons have maintained that their work is ultimately motivated by freedom of speech and anti-censorship ideals, it grew out of the notorious 4Chan message boards: an Internet repository for lolcats, anime and multiple genres of porn.

Continue…

Shame on RIM

By Jesse Brown - Friday, August 12, 2011 at 10:49 AM - 12 Comments

“What happens to your data when Facebook is sold off in pieces?”

“We’ll see how ‘un-evil’ Google is when they start losing money.”

Such dot com doomsday scenarios are often used to illustrate the folly of trusting private companies with personal information. But we needn’t rely on these hypothetical scenarios anymore. We have RIM.

The troubled Waterloo-based company is pandering to public hysteria, tripping over itself to hand over the private messages and GPS coordinates of anyone the London cops suspect of rioting. Or anyone they say they suspect—what’s the difference, right?

This desperate act will do little to reverse RIMs’s tumbling market share or restore its tarnished brand. It speaks of a cowardly company pathetically trying to spin negative headlines about “Rioting 2.0″ into free publicity about their concern for public safety.

Instead, they provide us with a sad, tangible example of why we need to reconsider our arrangements with tech service providers. RIM has the power to completely expose millions of people—expose them to ridicule, to violence, to persecution. They have proven in the past that they will do so whenever it seems to be in their best business interest. Oppressive regimes have made spying and/or censorship the cost of entry, and RIM has fallen into line.

Now they are also selling out their customers in a free, Western society. They have become the target of hackers as a result.

It’s hard to feel sorry for them.

Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown.

Facebook facial recognition technology not coming to Canada

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 12:43 PM - 0 Comments

Facebook’s new facial-recognition technology for photographs will not launch in Canada, a Facebook representative has confirmed. The rep did not say why Canada won’t adopt the controversial technology, which is capable of recognizing faces in photographs automatically, whether the user knows the person being identified or not. Digital rights groups in the U.S. are against the technology, arguing that it’s a gross invasion of privacy. Facebook users are not asked for their permission to be targeted by the technology, but must opt out instead. A coalition of U.S. digital rights groups has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission as a result.

The Globe and Mail

Who owns your Facebook friends?

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 11:08 AM - 13 Comments

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Investors eagerly awaiting a chance to get a piece of Facebook, valued as high as US$100 billion, might want to pay attention to the skirmish going on between the company and Google over who actually owns the “friends” of social networking users. Facebook’s lofty valuation is rooted in the idea that users will never abandon the site (as they once did with Friendster and later MySpace) because they don’t want to leave their friends behind. But what if someone makes it easy for them to take their friends with them?

Facebook, with some 700 million users, recently blocked a tool created by a third-party developer for Google’s Chrome browser that was designed to easily export a Facebook user’s friend list (including their all-important email addresses) to a rival social network. The developer assumed that Facebook users’ friends belong to them, not to Facebook. Facebook disagreed. With Google now trying to edge its way into the social networking space with Google+, Facebook explained that “each person owns her friends list, but not her friends’ information. A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums.”

What Facebook failed to mention is that it unsuccessfully tried to convince Google to allow its Gmail users to export their contact lists to Facebook last year. Getting other people’s email addresses is a key way Facebook helps to integrate new users into its site, allowing its software to suggest potential friends. Influential tech blogger Michael Arrington pointed out another irony: “Facebook already allows mass exporting of friends’ private email addresses via deals with Microsoft, Yahoo and possibly other partners.” In other words, it’s okay if Facebook does it to make money, but not if you want to switch to a rival network. And, as Arrington notes, that could be perceived as anti-competitive by the U.S. government. Suddenly, Facebook’s reign as social networking’s king looks a lot more vulnerable—as does that $100-billion valuation.

Google + you = what?

By Jesse Brown - Monday, July 4, 2011 at 11:58 AM - 0 Comments

It’s my fourth day on Google +, the search giant’s new social network service, and my impression is….non existent.

I don’t know what I think of +, but I must admit I’m intrigued. It’s obvious that there are tons of features within the service that Google is not pushing or even unveiling yet, for fear of scaring users off with too much complexity. It’s also clear that Google could have made things easier for me, algorithmically suggesting (or even automatically assigning) some friends from my Gmail contacts to get me started. But after their privacy snafu with Google Buzz, they don’t dare. Google doesn’t want to be pushy. It’s up to me to pick and choose who I’d like to share with, and then it’s up to them to decide if they want in too. Continue…

Winklevii drop Facebook appeal

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 23, 2011 at 11:39 AM - 0 Comments

The Winklevoss twins, made famous by the 2010 film “The Social Network,” have decided to drop their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court of a ruling upholding their multi-million dollar settlement with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss accused Zuckerberg of stealing the idea for Facebook from them when they were students at Harvard in 2004. In a statement filed in a California court Wednesday, the Winklevii, as they are collectively known, indicated they had decided to accept a 2008 ruling giving them US$65 million. Analysts predict the social networking site could be worth more than US$100 billion on the stock market.

Toronto Sun

Good news, bad news: June 9 – 16, 2011

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

Dirk Nowitzki is named MVP as his Dallas Mavericks win the NBA title. (David J. Phillip/AP)

Setting it straight

Federal government lawyers took a justified bruising from judges of the Ontario Court of Appeal at hearings on the fate of Canada’s prostitution laws. The Crown is appealing a decision that struck down bans on brothel organizing. The government argued existing Criminal Code provisions had only a “remote connection” with increased sex-trade risks. The judges exploded in disbelief. “What’s ‘remote’ about a law that prevents a prostitute from having a bodyguard?” asked Justice James MacPherson. The judges also admonished an effort to compare prostitutes—practising a business that is legal in itself—with drug pushers.

A slick move

Bowing to technical realities, the U.S. auto-service company Jiffy Lube is abandoning its rule that oil should be changed in any car every 3,000 miles (or 4,800 km). As engines and gasoline quality improve, manufacturers have lengthened recommended intervals between changes to as long as 16,000 km. Jiffy Lube will now follow the makers’ advice for each model. It’s a reminder that even in hard times, the auto sector has been improving in ways we barely bother to notice.

Continue…

Ex-wives rail about phony Facebook dads

By Joanne Latimer - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 4 Comments

Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

You see pictures of them playing with their kids in the park or posing at movie theatres. They document every family trip to a restaurant and every birthday present. Who are these seemingly devoted parents with digital cameras? They are the scourge of single moms everywhere: phony Facebook dads. “It’s infuriating! My ex’s Facebook page is full of pictures of our kids with their dad. Talk about false advertising! I still have to make him do activities with the kids!” says “Gail,” a single mom who is a translator in Montreal. (All of the single mothers in this piece requested anonymity.) “What am I going to post? Pictures of me making their lunch for school or banning the Xbox?”

“Tina,” a professor and another single mother, finally de-friended the father of her daughter. “He’s visibly trying to construct a narrative of himself as an involved father,” she noted. Aesthetician and single mom “Dina” put it another way: “What a crock! My ex’s photos say ‘Look at me, I’m a good dad,’ but I had to [garnishee] his wages to get child support. He complains about gas money to drive his daughter to birthday parties and he won’t babysit, yet he’ll post photos where he looks like the world’s best dad…right!”

Phony Facebook dads are the newest irritant for fractured families. “It’s very grating for the custodial parent, which is often the mother,” noted Deborah Brakeley, a clinical counsellor and collaborative divorce coach in Vancouver. “It’s well known that exes, particularly moms, become resentful when their partner suddenly becomes a more dutiful parent, or at least appears so. They ask, ‘Where were you?’ They feel deceived and angry.”

Continue…

Canadians bored with Facebook?

By macleans.ca - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 12:34 PM - 5 Comments

The number of Canadian users of Facebook plummeted in May, with around 10 per cent of Canadians saying sayonara to the social networking site. According to Inside Facebook, a site that tracks such data, 16.6 million Canadians used the site at the end of the month, down 1.52 million from the beginning of May. We weren’t alone. The United States, Britain, Norway and Russia all posted declines. And those statistics helped drag down the overall number of users joining Facebook. Whereas last year around 20 million people hopped on board each month, now that number has been cut almost in half. The slow down couldn’t come at a worse time. Wall Street is abuzz with speculation that Facebook will launch its much-anticipated IPO next year.

The Guardian

Attack of the Bimbots

By Jesse Brown - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 5:15 PM - 10 Comments

Have you ever been suckered into sharing personal information with an attractive stranger who turns out to be not quite….human? If so, you’re not alone.

Over at BlogAds, Henry Copeland has done some online sleuthing into the identity of one Nicole Bally, a friendly Facebook fox who probably does not exist. Nicole, it seems, is a “bimbot,” a fake account assembled with generic photographs and automated status updates, let loose on social networks to lure unsuspecting dupes into handing over access to their valuable social graphs.

Bimbots are common on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere, and I’ve always been confident in my ability to distinguish them from my many fleshy human admirers. But perhaps I shouldn’t be so cocky. After all, Nicole Bally’s list of conquests includes some of the savviest people on the Internet. She’s successfully friended Sean Parker of Napster and Facebook, Chris Anderson of Wired, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, and Arianna Huffington of Arianna Huffington. She’s even friended Vint Cerf himself—the father of the Internet!

The more impressive Nicole’s friend list gets, the more convincing she becomes to new suckers.  The first thing I look at when considering a friend request from a stranger is whether or not we have friends in common. The second thing I look at is whether their friends are people I’d like to have in common.

Heck, at a certain point, who cares if she’s human? Any robot with friends like that is a friend of mine.

So, what exactly is LinkedIn good for?

By Erica Alini - Monday, May 30, 2011 at 12:22 PM - 2 Comments

The social networking site LinkedIn must be suffering from a serious case of performance anxiety after last week’s Initial Public Offering. Shares priced at US$45 were trading above US$100 shortly after the offering, and the company’s market valuation now stands at around US$8 billion, or roughly 520 times its net earnings in 2010.

While there’s no shortage of warnings that this is yet another sign of a tech bubble in the making, even the critics admit there’s something more to LinkedIn than meets the eye. “You can make some reasonable assumptions that the company will be successful and profitable in the future,” says Josh Bernoff, a social media analyst at Forrester Research. In part, that’s because the number of LinkedIn’s members is growing, and there aren’t competitors on the horizon to woo them away. LinkedIn currently stands at over 90 million registered users, almost double as many as it had only two years ago. If that seems small compared to Facebook’s 500 million-strong network, it’s because LinkedIn appeals to a very specific kind of user: White-collar office dwellers. In a online entry for Business Insider, marketing consultant Byrne Hobart calls it “the place for things you’re willing to brag about, which are not fun.” It’s the social network where people job-hunt, and schmooze—a niche that has little to do with Facebook, which is all about vacation pictures and updates about kids and pets.

The amount of time LinkedIn users are spending on the website is also growing. And the bigger the network gets, the more useful it becomes for its members, who are then more likely to become active and engaged. Faiyaz Dossaji, for example, joined LinkedIn about four years ago, but didn’t initially see the benefit of it. “I joined because I was job-hunting at the time, …but I hadn’t thought too much about it because nothing came of it,” says the 31-year old analyst at BAE Systems, a defense, security and aerospace systems firm. Last year, though, Dossaji, who was again searching for job opportunities, heard of a former boss who’d found a job through LinkedIn. That spurred him to devote more energies to the site, joining groups of other professionals and alumni networks and asking for recommendations from former employers. Not long afterwards he received an inquiry from an employer–the very BAE Systems he now works for.

If job hunters are rapidly warming up to LinkedIn, headhunters are already unwavering loyalists. Byron Tarboton, head of research and operations at Archer Mathieson, a U.K.-based management recruiting firm, calls the social network “a primary tool” for his job. “About 90 to 95 per cent of the individuals I place in roles are through LinkedIn,” he says. That’s because the website is an ideal search engine for resumes. It allows Tarboton, for example, to look for a human resources director in the fast-moving consumer goods industry, working in a company with a client size of 500 to 2000 individuals, and living within a 25 miles radius from the new, prospective employer. A search like that, he says, would normally turn up anywhere between 50 and 500 potential job candidates. LinkedIn charges a fee for this type of service, but the price tag is easily justified. For about $80 a month, Tarboton can reach up to 50 potential candidates a month; if only one of them is hired, he pockets between $40,000 and $50,000.

Users like Tarboton make up the backbone of LinkedIn’s business, which last year, according to Business Insider, derived over US$100 million of its US$243 million revenue from its recruiting services. A much smaller part of that comes from premium subscriptions, which, for example, allow members to reach out to other users outside their network of contacts. Finally, a sizable slice of the money comes from advertising. The three-pronged revenue structure is another factor that sets LinkedIn apart from Facebook, whose business relies almost exclusively on marketing—and another trait appreciated by investors.

But whether LinkedIn is worth US$4 billion, as the initial IPO pricing suggested, or $8 billion, as the market seems to think, it will need to continue to grow fast. LinkedIn will have to find a way to increase ads while maintaining their characteristic unobtrusiveness. And it will have to find new members beyond the North American market, which is close to saturation, says Bernoff. In Europe, that means taking on the local online professional networks: France’s Viadeo, with its 35 million members, and Germany’s Xing, which counts over 10 million. In China, there’s the problem of heavy regulation and government interference with the Internet, something that tripped up even Google. Elsewhere in Asia there’s the question of cultural barriers. Facebook hit a wall in Japan, where people tend to engage in online social networking using pseudonyms rather than their real names. In LinkedIn’s case, Japan and Korea’s corporate culture means that employees don’t switch jobs very often, and they might not feel the need to network professionally, says Bernoff.

None of this, of course, spells doom for LinkedIn’s prospects, but it probably indicates that, even if the US$8 billion valuation is no bubble, the market might need to let out some hot air soon.

Democracy by tweet

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, May 27, 2011 at 5:21 PM - 1 Comment

Steve Paikin convenes a panel—including Treasury Board President Tony Clement, the NDP’s Charlie Angus and our own Jesse Brown—to discuss technology and politics.

I confess to being somewhat closer to Mr. Angus’ position when it comes to Twitter, at least insofar as its impact on the last election cycle is concerned. I’ve tended to think its been like introducing crack into the political sphere: rendering everything that takes place within this world even more incomprehensible to those on the outside.

High-tech smear job

By Chris Sorensen - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 8:05 AM - 0 Comments

Keystone Press

The overlap between Facebook and Google isn’t immediately obvious—one is a social network, the other a search engine—but Facebook’s recent attempts to plant nasty news stories about Google demonstrates just how intense the rivalry between the two tech giants has become. Facebook was recently forced to admit it secretly hired PR firm Burson-Marsteller to urge journalists to investigate claims that Google had invaded people’s privacy with its new social networking tool, Social Circle, a potential Facebook competitor.

Despite their different business models, both companies rely on online advertising to pay the bills, with Google leading the charge with annual sales of about US$29 billion, compared to an estimated US$1 billion for Facebook. But Facebook is growing fast and, in many cases, is competing for the same bucket of ad dollars. Longer term, there’s speculation Facebook could replace Google as the Web’s gatekeeper, with users turning to their social networks when looking for online information. This may be the first time the fight between the duo has turned dirty, but likely not the last.