Interesting Snippets

the real comparison is not with other social networks. To give real credit to its achievement today and its ambitions for the future, it can only be said that Facebook’s true competitor is the rest of the entire internet.

The internet allows three things, broadly speaking: access to content (video, music, things to read), self-expression (blogs, Twitter) and communication (e-mail, chat, Skype). Facebook competes with it on all these fronts. By one estimate, one minute in every seven spent online, anywhere in the world, is spent on Facebook.

We had 901 million MAUs as of March 31, 2012, an increase of 33% as compared to 680 million MAUs as of March 31, 2011.
We had 526 million daily active users (DAUs) on average in March 2012, an increase of 41% as compared to 372 million DAUs in March 2011.
We had 488 million MAUs who used Facebook mobile products in March 2012.
There were more than 125 billion friend connections on Facebook as of March 31, 2012.
Our users generated an average of 3.2 billion Likes and Comments per day during the first quarter of 2012.

Zuckerberg didn’t just wait. He obsessively learned what being a CEO was about. He surrounded himself by people who had strengths he didn’t and absorbed from them like a sponge. Unlike nearly every other Internet wunderkind who came before him, he didn’t hire the grown-up to run the company. He became the grown-up to run the company.

There are a lot of reasons Larry Page envies Mark Zuckerberg these days. But the pre-IPO Page would most definitely envy his ability to hold onto the reins, experience and age be damned.

Since 2006, I’ve argued that Facebook is not the prototypical Web 2.0 company: It’s an outlier. It’s one of those companies that comes along every decade or so and does more than just create wealth and jobs and a product we can’t live without. It changes the very nature of what it means to be a startup. It innovates not only on whatever product it is taking to market– it innovates the idea of what a startup is.

There’ve been several of these throughout Valley history: Shockley Labs, Fairchild Semiconductor, HP, Intel, Silicon Graphics, Oracle, Netscape, eBay, Cisco, Google are some of the major ones. Each has in its own way changed the game.

Sheryl Sandberg – Chief Operating Officer at Facebook – spoke at Hubert Burda’s DLD conference in Munich and stated that we were in the middle of 3 trends. First, a trend “from anonymity to real identity”. Secondly, a trend from “wisdom of crowds to wisdom of friends” and third, a trend “from being receivers of information to broadcasters of information”.

Mark Zuckerberg frightens many in appearing to view privacy not as civilization’s Ur-right but as a basically silly notion to be slowly outgrown. He is a homogenizer of experience, a commoditizer, and so obliterator, of the private self. But what could be more in step with history’s de-personalizing course? Once, the sun went around the earth, and the light of the stars was that of heaven, and each town had its own little hamburger shop.

The Winklevosses—Gentlemen of Harvard, Olympic dreamers, Leyendecker men—could not more fully evoke the past, which, for better or worse, always loses to the future.

There’s a hot new Web site making the rounds that mines your Facebook account and inserts your photo and other information into a creepy video — playing right into our biggest fears about privacy and the information we share online.

The mysterious site is called Take This Lollipop. After you give the site permission to connect to your Facebook account, it beings playing a video featuring a sweaty, twitchy man, sitting in a darkened room, using a computer to nose around Facebook. But he’s not browsing through just any random page — he’s looking at your account and getting increasingly agitated by what he’s seeing.