Social Media

Facebook will comply with an order from the U.K.'s High Court to reveal the identities of cyberbullies who targeted a woman with abusive comments.

Nicola Brookes appealed to the court after she was falsely labeled a pedophile and drug dealer by fellow Facebook members who set up a fake profile page of her on the site, according to the Guardian. The abuse allegedly started after Brookes posted a comment supporting a contestant on the British TV show "X Factor."

The order, which Facebook has not yet received since it must physically be delivered in the U.… Read more

It's become fashionable in some quarters to bash various aspects of social media. Whether it's the Facebook IPO, or mostly apocryphal stories about criminals using residents' status updates to rob empty homes, or complaints about users wasting time on different platforms. Most skeptics happen to be non-users (or light users) of social media, but I'm not using this post to push back against them.

Instead, I want to highlight an attribute of social media that is vastly overlooked by skeptics and most observers. That attribute: Generosity.

NOT JUST NARCISSISTS: Social media rightly has the reputation of being … Read more

Will Facebook suffer the same fate as MySpace in a few years? That's what one analyst predicts.

Speaking on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" program Monday, Eric Jackson, founder of Ironfire Capital, said that Facebook will lose its dominance as a social network in five to eight years.

In his forecast, Jackson cited Facebook's inability to crack the mobile market and the stock's 27 percent nosedive since the company's IPO.

"In five to eight years they are going to disappear in the way that Yahoo has disappeared," Jackson said. "Yahoo … Read more

Do you spend less time on Facebook than you did six months ago? If so, you're not alone.

A recent survey of Facebook users found that 34 percent of them spend less time on the site than they did half a year ago. Why the cold shoulder?

Those among the 34 percent described Facebook as "boring," "not relevant," or "not useful." Concerns over privacy ranked third on the list.

Only 20 percent said they now spend more time on the social network, while almost half spend around the same amount of time. Among … Read more

This is NOT another article complaining -- or gloating -- about the Facebook IPO debacle. Instead it's about the rollout of a simple feature that appears to have a lot of potential for revenue for the company.

It's the new-to-me "Promote" button that has started showing up on SreeTips, my Facebook business page (I hate the term "fan page"; Eliza Cooper -- @ElizaIn140 -- a friend and social media consultant, helps me run the page). I say "new-to-me" because, with 900 million users, features get rolled out at different times to different … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Sitting in the windowless basement level of a nondescript building in the shadow of the Bay Bridge, Andy Miller is doing one of his most essential -- and rewarding -- jobs: helping smart and talented, but young and inexperienced, entrepreneurs navigate the crucial steps needed to move their new company forward. After all, great technology can only get you so far. It takes great business strategy and decisions to build a truly successful company.

Miller, a general partner at Highland Capital Partners who once reported directly to Steve Jobs as Apple's vice president of mobile advertising, is seated … Read more

By almost any standard, Mark Zuckerberg has had a week to remember. Yesterday, he started his day off by ringing the Nasdaq bell and taking his social-networking company public, raising $16 billion in the process. Earlier in the week, his longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan graduated from medical school. And today, just for good measure, the two shocked a bunch of friends and family with a surprise wedding in the Facebook CEO's backyard.

A look at Zuckerberg's Facebook page reveals that he is now "Married to Priscilla Chan." That was not the case yesterday, the day that … Read more

Facebook knows mobile is its Achilles' heel, but I didn't expect the company to take such aggressive actions to solve its mobile problem.

The social network admitted to the weakness earlier this month when it amended its IPO filing. "If users increasingly access Facebook mobile products as a substitute for access through personal computers, and if we are unable to successfully implement monetization strategies for our mobile users, or if we incur excessive expenses in this effort, our financial performance and ability to grow revenue would be negatively affected," the company explained in its amended S1.

Facebook … Read more

If you want to know where the most famous hoodie-wearer in the world will be Friday morning, he'll be ringing a bell in Hacker Square.

Hacker Square is more or less the center of Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, and features a giant "HACK" in the cement that's large enough to be seen from space. The man with the hoodie is, of course, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. At 6:30 a.m. PT tomorrow, a source told CNET, Zuck will stand by a big crane in the square and ring a ceremonial bell in time … Read more