Social networking

When will the market mint a new round of Facebook millionaires? The folks at Business Insider suggest an IPO filing may hit the wires soon, possibly in January.

The sourcing is attributed to someone described in the article as being "close to Facebook employees"--a description that narrows it down to Mr. Bacciagalupe and about 300 million other Americans. But let's preempt the drama and stipulate the obvious: Facebook will go public when--as company management has repeated ad nauseum--the time is right.

But when? That's the tricky part.

Everyone knows that the clock is ticking. In … Read more

I'm afraid to click any links on Facebook these days.

No, it's got nothing to do with the spam attack and the flood of nasty images making their way into news feeds all last week. Instead, it's because the slow spread of Facebook's Open Graph scheme is totally ruining sharing.

I know you've seen this at the top of your news feed: a list of stories your friends have been reading. Or, simply, a single post with a great headline leading to a story that you'd really like to read. So you click it, … Read more

Google has added a new Trends feature to its Google+ search.

Now when Google+ users input a search, the results page's right sidebar displays the top 10 most-popular topics on the social network. Upon clicking one of the trending topics, users will be brought to a page showing all the most recent user updates on the topic. A "best of" option is also available to let users see some of the top posts related to the given topic.

Mashable, which first reported on the update, claims the Trends feature went live last night.

If the feature sounds … Read more

George Clooney seems like a delightful man.

When he isn't seen with beautiful ladies half his age, he's seen with Brad Pitt. He has a house on Lake Como in Italy, the home of louche sophistication. He is politically engaged, but never, it seems, romantically.

So how on earth might anyone think that His Suaveness could possibly play Steve Jobs?

This almost rhetorical question tortures me this morning because of a report in the highly authoritative Now magazine that Clooney is being considered for the lead in a new Steve jobs biopic.

Yes, Jobs was a notoriously sophisticated … Read more

I am about to stun you. I hope you are prepared. For this will be like being tased, bro'.

Gamers, apparently, are no longer teenage boys with growing pains.

No, according to a study performed by Harris Interactive at the behest of Gamehouse--which seems to be a site where you can, well, game--more than half of online gamers are actually female.

Should you still be breathing, might I turn your attention to some further results of this analysis of more than 2,000 adults.

Women gamers have more sex than women non-gamers. Yes, by the vast margin of 5 … Read more

Although it seems like many initial Google+ users might have dropped off after a few months since signing up, new research shows otherwise.

The latest traffic report from research firm Experian Hitwise affirms that Google+ traffic is up--so much so that last week (the week ending November 12) was the third best week of traffic in the U.S. since launching this summer.

Based on the graph below, it looks like Google+ really hit its peak in September. Although it dipped considerably in October, those figures are still much higher than anything before the week ending September 24.

Of course, … Read more

I know there are many people whose eyelids are fluttering at the prospect of the new Google Galaxy Nexus phone.

There are slightly more people, though, who will never have heard of it.

Which means if you're going to produce an ad that says, roughly: "Hullo, this is the new, frightfully exciting, earth-shuddering phone from your Google buddies," then perhaps that ad should project your thought.

Instead, we are offered something that might well have been for a school, a retreat, or a local Green Party candidate.

It has pretty, caring young people enjoying their lives to … Read more

Yelp, the giant local-reviews network, filed today to raise as much as $100 million in an initial offering--one that, should it come off as planned, would allow the startup to boast it was right to spurn would-be suitors Google and Yahoo.

Yelp didn't disclose a target share price or a potential market cap valuation, which is par for the course in initial IPO filings. Fortune's Dan Primack notes that Yelp is reportedly seeking a valuation in the $1 billion to $2 billion range.

The IPO filing is a big, but long-expected move for Yelp, which was founded … Read more

Google+ Pages have already been set up by 61 of the world's top 100 brands, though many have yet to take full advantage of the new business feature.

In a study released yesterday, social management company BrightEdge found that though 61 of the companies had already set up their Google+ Pages less than a week after the feature debuted, only 12 of those had displayed a link to those pages from their Web sites, which BrightEdge sees as a key way to round up followers.

Among the top 100 brands, Google had 65,000 followers on Google+ when BrightEdge … Read more