Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
Editor's note: Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable , a popular blog about social media. He writes a weekly column about social networking and tech for CNN.com. (CNN) -- Facebook beat out Google as the No. 1 most-visited site in the United States in 2010, according to Internet analytics firm Hitwise. How was Facebook able to outplay the former Web champion?
How Facebook eclipsed Google in 2010 - CNN.com
“The Social Network”: Mashable’s Complete Movie Review
On the surface, The Social Network is the story of Facebook — a website created in a Harvard dorm room in 2004 that has redefined how we connect and communicate in the 21st century. At its core, the film is much, much more than just the story of one website. It is both a micro and macro look at success, failure and the trappings of ego and greed.
This past week the Economist published a piece entitled Primates On Facebook that described some research done by the Facebook Data Team. Since there have been a number of questions throughout the monkeysphere , we thought we would take the opportunity to describe our approach, the data, and our analysis. We were asked a simple question: is Facebook increasing the size of people’s personal networks? This is a particularly difficult question to answer, so as a first attempt we looked into the types of relationships people do maintain, and the relative size of these groups. The image above presents a high-level overview of our findings: while the average Facebook user communicates with a small subset of their entire friend network, they maintain relationships with a group two times the size of this core. This not only affects each user, but also has systemic effects that may explain why things spread so quickly on Facebook.
Maintained Relationships on Facebook | overstated
Facebook Unveils Recommended Subscriptions
What do you get when you combine the biggest collection of personal taste data in history with the world's easiest method of subscribing to syndicated content? In theory, one of the most potent recommendation engines around. Facebook quietly made available to all its 500 million plus users a new feature today called the Page Browser and though everything about it is quite understated - it could prove to be a very big deal.
Blog - Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook
Let’s all ban Facebook! Update: Due to the surprising popularity of this post, I feel I should be absolutely clear about my role as VP of Engineering for a Hollywood-based social media startup, BorderStylo . The opinions expressed here are purely my own and are not in any way endorsed by my employer. While I do not see our applications as directly competitive to Facebook, nor have I presented them as such, it would be disingenuous not to mention this. After some reflection, I’ve decided to delete my account on Facebook.Looking at, looking up or keeping up with people?
This paper investigates the uses of social networking site Facebook, and the gratifications users derive from those uses. In the first study, 137 users generated words or phrases to describe how they used Facebook, and what they enjoyed about their use. These phrases were coded into 46 items which were completed by 241 Facebook users in Study 2. Factor analysis identified seven unique uses and gratifications: social connection, shared identities, content, social investigation, social network surfing and status updating.
Sex! Hackers! Embellishment! The Inside Story of the Facebook Movie | Magazine
Computer guys have never had a this-is-our-moment movie that makes a splashy myth out of quotidian reality—where everyone looks sexy-tormented in the bargain. Illustration: Martin Ansin Mark Zuckerberg is many things, not least a student of the classics.
"The Social Network" Writer on Mark Zuckerberg: "I've Been That Guy"
The Social Network screenwriter Aaron Sorkin voiced “empathy” for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ‘s position as an accused idea thief — an accusation that plays a central role in the film about the young executive. The film is based on a book called Accidental Billionaires , which among other things accounts a dispute between Zuckerberg and individuals who accused him of stealing their ideas when creating the social network. Sorkin said in an interview with Time, “I’ve been that guy. I’ve been the Mark Zuckerberg in that situation, and I have absolute empathy for him.” He referenced occasions when would-be screenwriters tried to claim that they’d come up with the idea for The West Wing , the TV series he ran for seven years, as the reasons for his empathy. At one point in the film the Zuckerberg character says, “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you would have invented Facebook.”
Back when it was first announced that rocker Trent Reznor would be scoring David Fincher’s The Social Network , we thought it was a match made in pop culture heaven — a movie about the dark side of the social networking biz, scored by a man who has plumbed the depths of social media, while also wrestling with its implications? Sign us up. Well, we got an aural glimpse at the soundtrack the other week after Reznor, along with his record company, The Null Corporation, and Sony’s Madison Gate Records announced the disc on Null Co’s website and gave fans a five-song sneak peek. Now we’re itching to see how music and celluloid go together.
Exclusive: Trent Reznor on "The Social Network" and the Evolving Music Biz [INTERVIEW]