Mark Zuckerberg

I miss having a place on the web to call my own.

How I long for the mid 90s, before the days of social graph or APIs.
I miss MySpace, and LiveJournal and Geocities.

Those spaces were my own for a time.

But with the announcement of Facebook’s new Graph Search engine, there is really nowhere on the web for me to hide anymore.

Continue reading "Nowhere to hide: I want Myspace and privacy back" »

Lonely hearts and internet creeps rejoice! “Facebook stalking” just got a heck of a lot easier.

The new “graph search” function announced by Mark Zuckerberg today will turn Facebook into the world’s largest matchmaking site. Think of it as eHarmony’s loaded, arrogant cousin.

Facebook users will now be able to sift efficiently through the profiles of other members, finding people with common interests and, well, coveting them. Clever lovelorns could even narrow their searches to the pages of “friends of friends who are single”.

Continue reading "Facebook has finally evolved into a glorified dating site" »

Mark Zuckerberg married his long-term girlfriend Priscilla Chan last weekend in the back yard of their home. My first thought was “how lovely for them”, but it seems most people’s first thought was “I wonder what the pre-nup says”.

Donald Trump can be expected to head straight for this crass territory, and immediately obliged. But AM reported this morning that after an overnight plunge in Facebook’s post-IPO value, “investors are starting to ask for details about any pre nuptial agreement and what Mark Zuckerberg’s changed status might mean for the company’s long term value and stability.”

I wonder how Priscilla is enjoying her honeymoon, knowing the entire investment world is speculating on how much she could take her beloved for if she decides to cut and run.

Continue reading "You’d think she was a plant to destroy Facebook" »

The best thing about Facebook’s decision to add an “organ donor” status to their pages is that it might help prevent the family veto on the essential process. The worst thing is that it’s not available to Australian users – yet.

By clicking into the Life Event section of their Timeline, Facebook users in the United Kingdom and United States can now alert their family and friends to their decision to donate their organs. Important note: clicking the status option won’t make it legitimate, users still need to register their decision to donate with their own state.

Facebook has high hopes for this tiny change to its page. Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s COO said it is part of using Facebook to “build tools that help people transform the way we all solve worldwide social problems.”

Continue reading "Click “Like” and donate your organs to medicine" »

I woke up yesterday morning to horrific news. My favourite iPhone application of all time, the time-wasting fun-machine photo social network Instagram, had been snaffled up by Facebook for a frankly mind-boggling sum.

Apparently a picture is not worth a thousand words, it is worth $1 billion.

Oh Instagram, why did it have to come to this? After wiping away my tears, the enormity of the purchase sank in. Here was a company of 13 employees being valued at more than the New York Times.

Continue reading "Another billion reasons to hate Mark Zuckerberg" »

In an interview discussing his increasing philanthropy late last year, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg noted that “when you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place. So, what we view our role as, is giving people that power.”

Facebook, for Zuckerberg, has a role to play in power systems. It can be a political tool for leaders. And he’s right, but only conditionally; a number of other groups need to come to the party before we can consider social media a tool for good.

I spent a recent weekend helping Year 11 students understand what it means to be a leader, and I can safely say that I don’t share the pessimism about our future that the majority of headlines concerning ‘young Australians’ seems to show. But nor can I say in good conscience that the future is all roses.

Continue reading "We don’t expect much from youth so that’s what we get" »

It’s been a big year for 26 year old Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

Not only was he the subject of movie, “The Social Network” he’s also just been made Time person of 2010, “for changing how we all live our lives in ways that are innovative and even optimistic.”

There’s no question that Zuckerberg is a success; Facebook has 600 million members, employs 1, 700 people and is worth an estimated fortune of £4.4 billion.

Continue reading "Did Time get it right with Mark Zuckerberg?" »

At some point in the past decade, geeks became cool.

Like the products they created, geeks began to be marketed as friendly and helpful types that everyday people could turn to to solve problems or get more out of life.

Sometimes they even seemed to be attractive to women. The Social Network should go some way to ending all of this.

Continue reading "Social network geeks aren’t cool, just angry losers" »