Negative Blogs

Shane Richmond and Will Heaven answer the question facing Mark
Zuckerberg at the beginning of 2011.

By Shane Richmond and Will Heaven
11:41PM GMT 04 Jan 2011

Comments

Yes – 500 million members suggest it’s well on the way, says Shane Richmond.

Whichever way you look at it, 2010 was a spectacular year for Facebook. In
America, it overtook Google to become the most visited website; globally,
it’s the third‑largest website, behind Microsoft and Google. Its founder and
chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, was Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

Over the new year weekend, Facebook users uploaded 750 million photos. That’s
more than one picture for each user of the site, which now has a membership
of well over 500 million people. And this week it was announced that Goldman
Sachs will invest $450 million (£288 million) in Facebook, taking the
valuation of the site to $50 billion (£32 billion).

Then consider the fact that Facebook is still growing – at the rate of 700,000
people a day. It’s closing in on 600 million users, and as more join, the
network becomes more powerful. Its members aren’t just chatting and sharing
photos, they are also playing games, reading the news and keeping up with
famous people. Facebook Places lets them share their location with friends;
Facebook Messages aims to replace our email accounts; and the Facebook
experience is now available on more than two million websites.

At the heart of this is Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old Harvard drop-out who
has become the world’s youngest billionaire. According to those around him,
he’s not motivated by money, which is why he has resisted pressure to sell
Facebook. He lives a relatively modest life, by all accounts. His motivation
seems to be to drive Facebook forwards – and his success at doing that has
been staggering. Profiling him last month, Time magazine noted that in
addition to his expertise as a computer programmer, Zuckerberg “understands
a remarkable amount about other people”. His mother was a psychiatrist and
he studied some psychology at Harvard. There is a team of very smart people
around him. The site competes aggressively with its Silicon Valley
competitors to snap up the best talent. But even with the social networking
“think tank” that Facebook has established at its headquarters in Palo Alto,
California, it’s Zuckerberg who remains the leader.

Related Articles

Article extracted from telegraph.co.uk

The state of Virginia has backed away from its attempts to force Facebook to divulge the complete contents of a user’s account to settle a dispute over workers’ compensation, narrowly avoiding what promised to be a high-profile privacy battle in federal court.

On Monday, the Virginia’s Workers Compensation Commission said it was no longer going to levy a $200-a-day fine on the social-networking site for refusing to comply with a subpoena from an airline that previously employed a flight attendant named Shana Hensley.

Facebook had objected to the June 4 subpoena from Colgan Air–the Manassas, Va.-based company that operates under the names United Express, US Airways Express, and Continental Connection–on privacy grounds. It said federal law prohibits divulging user data in response to a subpoena, and promised to “further litigate this issue by seeking, among other things, an injunction from the federal courts.”

In principle, this isn’t a novel concept: employers and insurance companies have long used private investigators to ferret out fraud and show that someone who claims to be a virtual cripple actually participates in waterskiing competitions.

Because social-networking sites offer such information-rich glimpses into a person’s private life, insurers and employers have begun eyeing them. A personal injury lawyer in Elmira, N.Y., noted in July that an accident victim claiming to be severely injured was, thanks to Facebook, revealed to be playing in soccer games. An article last week in Business Insurance said that social-networking sites revealed exaggerated claims of injuries from a judo instructor, a bowler, and a rodeo bronco rider.

In the Colgan Air case, Facebook says it’s happy that privacy rights prevailed. “We’re pleased with the outcome and that our users’ information will be protected,” said Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt.

Colgan Air, which is owned by the publicly traded Pinnacle Airlines, initially paid Hensley’s disability benefits that were related to a back injury while on the job (she was diagnosed with a herniated disc that did not want surgery). After about 18 months, however, Colgan Air claimed that Hensley was not cooperating with its efforts to find her a desk job and appears to have concluded that Hensley’s holiday vacation photos posted on her Facebook account would demonstrate that any back problems were not severe.

Popular social networking site Facebook is breaching Canadian law by holding on to users’ personal information indefinitely, a report has concluded.

An investigation by Canada’s privacy commission found the US-based website also gave “confusing or incomplete” information to subscribers.

Facebook says it is aiming to safeguard users’ privacy without compromising their experience of the site.

More than 200 million people actively use Facebook.

They include about 12 million in Canada, more than one in three of the population.