Super Volatile

However, even if Facebook gets to 3 billion users, if it doesn't increase its revenue per user, the company will only generate $13 billion in revenue per year, as analyst Trip Chowdry has pointed out. That's not going to justify a market capitalization of $100 billion. Google, for example, generated $38 billion in revenue -- nearly three times Facebook's hypothetical three-billion-user hypothetical -- and has a market cap of $190 billion.

To give it some context: Boeing's market cap is $56 billion. Boeing is world biggest airplane manufacturer. Facebook sells “eyeballs”.

Erika Gable, 29, who lives in Brooklyn and does public relations for restaurants, never understood the appeal of Facebook in the first place. She says the daily chatter that flows through the site — updates about bad hair days and pictures from dinner — is virtual clutter she doesn’t need in her life.

An investigative article on obscure subculture of seemingly normal people who hide the dark secret: they're not on Facebook. So far the journalists discovered that such strange lifeforms exist, though further research is required to establish how is that possible.

"quitting" Facebook altogether is unrealistic

Why?

We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage - we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action. Even if you have faith in their good intentions, you feel misgivings about stepping into the elaborate shrine they've built to document your entire online life.

Open data advocates tell us the answer is to reclaim this obsessive dossier for ourselves, so we can decide where to store it. But this misses the point of how stifling it is to have such a permanent record in the first place. Who does that kind of thing and calls it social?

Fantastic analysis of what is fundamentally wrong with social networks. Great read.

Max Schrems wasn't sure what he would get when he asked Facebook to send him a record of his personal data from three years of using the site.

What the 24-year-old Austrian law student didn't expect, though, was 1222 pages of data on a CD. It included chats he had deleted more than a year ago, "pokes" dating back to 2008, invitations to which he had never responded, let alone attended, and hundreds of other details.

It's an interesting development, though I don't see how exactly Max's actions brought “Facebook to heel”.

On Facebook, if someone wants to tag another person — say their brother at dinner — they just start writing the name and Facebook figures out the rest using an algorithm that understands names. In comparison, on Twitter, people have to understand @ symbols, hashtags and other strange intricacies of the service. These features make Twitter a great tool for many, but not for all.

Why Twitter attracts more technologically adept people than Facebook.

All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

Ever wondered how Amazon has embraced a service-oriented architecture that works? Or why exactly Google has to fear Facebook and Amazon? This rant has it all and is an excellent read.

It was written by Steve Yegge and aimed only at people from Google, but got out accidentally with a big splash on the web. Yegge had been working for Amazon for six years before he moved to Google in 2005.

This all marks a significant leap forward in the sometimes hostile Facebook and Apple relationship. It began well when Apple first set up an Apple Students group on Facebook in 2006 — “a monster success” for both companies, according to a source who spoke with Mashable on the condition of anonymity.

But the companies would butt heads many times in the following years.

The short history of cold war between Facebook and Apple.

In this video, Chuck Rossi, Facebook’s release engineer, dives into the tools and processes his team uses to make it possible to update Facebook on a daily basis – with rarely a public mishap.

Facebook operations team consist of 3 engineers. The presentation shows tools and practices they employ to manage Facebook's frequent updates.

For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.

The plot backfired when the blogger turned down Burson’s offer and posted the emails that Burson had sent him. It got worse when USA Today broke a story accusing Burson of spreading a “whisper campaign” about Google “on behalf of an unnamed client.”

Yet another difference between Facebook and Google. In action.