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Airtime – Like Chatroulette Only Without the Exposed Genitals (Includes Airtime How-to)

Chatroulette founder Andrey Ternovskiy acknowledged that the Chatroulette video chat site that he founded when he was 17 had..problems, primarily that users of Chatroulette liked to expose themselves. But Ternovskiy believed in Chatroulette, so strongly, in fact, that he moved to Palo Alto, the hotbed of startup funding. Nonetheless, Chatroulette essentially tanked, in large part owing to the X-rated material. Enter Napster co-founders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, who have now co-founded Airtime, a randomized video-chat service which they say has all the fun of Chatroulette, without the exposed private parts. They have even managed to raise $33 million dollars in investments from top-shelf Silicon Valley venture funds.

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How Much is Facebook Worth?

To anyone who follows technology in particular or business in general, it has become clear that the Facebook IPO (Initial Public Offering) was, to put it lightly, a major disappointment. The Facebook IPO was supposed to be a financial victory that fit neatly into the timeline (no pun intended) of one of the most successful technology companies in history. But since going public, the value of Facebook shares (and by extension, of course, the value of Facebook as a company) have plummeted. This is not how things were supposed to go. But Facebook is young and the company has plenty of time to recover, so we wanted to cut through the negative press about the IPO to examine where Facebook shares are potentially going and where they have been. Basically, what is Facebook worth, and just as importantly, what should Facebook be worth?

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Facebook Stock Prices Dip More than 10 Percent after IPO

After all the hype, Facebook’s newly traded stock plunged nearly 11% between its opening day (Friday, May 18) and the following Monday (May 21). Compare that to Google, whose stock never even fell back to their IPO price of $100.00 per share, let alone went below the initial offering price. Facebook’s IPO price opened at $38.00 per share, and by the close of the market on Monday, it had dipped down to $34.03, a decline of 10.99%.

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Facebook Not Loading for You? This May be Why

Is Facebook not loading for you properly? If your problem isn’t that Facebook is down, or that you can’t get to the site, but that the page isn’t loading everything (and especially if several Facebook pages aren’t loading everything), the problem may not be on Facebook’s end (exactly) but with your computer. Or, put more properly, Facebook may have tweaked something on its end that has caused software on your computer to need to be updated in order to play nicely with Facebook again. Does your effort to load Facebook result in something that looks like this?:

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What Facebook Knows About You

At this point, most of us know that Facebook collects an enormous amount of personal information about its users. Facebook relentlessly absorbs data – unfathomable amounts of data – that it saves and then uses for various purposes, like targeted advertising. But what kind of personal information does Facebook collect? How much personal information does Facebook have about you? What, in short, does Facebook know about you?

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Are You a Facebook Organ Donor?

At last, Facebook is leveraging their massive influence on the population for a good cause. Facebook is trying to boost organ donation by including a new status: organ donor. In addition, they are pushing the initiative, to encourage people to sign up to be organ donors. And it’s working.

Unfortunately, you can only update your status if you have caved to the new “Timeline” feature (which many of us have not – but that’s ok for us, as we have been organ donors for decades).

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Facebook IPO May be Delayed

As we mentioned last week, Facebook’s IPO (initial public offering) was expected mid May. However, reports are surfacing that it may now be at least June before Facebook has their IPO. Here’s why.

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Facebook IPO Expected on May 17

The Facebook IPO will be the IPO (Initial Public Offering) to end all IPOs, or at least that’s what you would think based on the hype surrounding it, and now May 17 is the day on which it is scheduled to occur, according to dozens of news sources. Over-hyped or not, the Facebook IPO is definitely a big deal – it very well could be the biggest Internet IPO in history, although this depends on what Facebook is worth (or what it is perceived to be worth by investors on the day the company’s stock goes on sale). Regardless, it will almost certainly make several Facebook employees, especially founder Mark Zuckerberg, very, very rich. It will also be constantly speculated about before the IPO happens, and endlessly discussed thereafter. Now is as good a time as any to join the chorus.

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What is Joseph Kony 2012? Why is it Important?

If you are a part of virtually any social network: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and even Pinterest, you have likely seen either, “Joseph Kony 2012” or, “Let’s Make Joseph Kony Famous” meme’s cropping up everywhere. Who is Joseph Kony and why is everyone trying to make him so relevant?

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Facebook Admits that it CAN Read Your Android Text Messsages; Swears that it Doesn’t

Facebook is hotly denying the allegations that it reads text messages sent through the Facebook app available on Android phones, which includes text messaging. Oh, they readily admit that they can read them, they just deny that they are reading them.

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The Facebook “Get Started” Tab

With Facebook’s upcoming $5 billion dollar IPO, they must figure that they can do anything they want (like they didn’t before?). Of course, now that they will have stockholders they are going to have to focus even more on earning money, more than anything else, and of course they do that on the backs of their users.

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Saudi Women Showing Body Parts Online in Effort to “Liberate Themselves from Social Restrictions”

Reports are coming out that there is a new trend amongst Saudi women looking to rebel, where they post pictures of various parts of their bodies to Facebook. While Americans may be used to the “Girls Gone Wild” brazenness of young women in in the US, the pictures posted by Saudi women are much more tame by American standards, but some Saudi people are extremely unhappy with what is displayed in the pictures.

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Facebook “If I Die” App Lets Users Leave Posthumous Facebook Message

A new Facebook program, called “If I Die” (shouldn’t that be “When I Die” or “If I’m Dead”?) allows a last farewell message to be posted to the user’s wall after they pass away. No, they don’t actually post after they are dead from beyond the grave (that would be a Oujia Board app), but the “If I Die” app is said to be the next best thing.

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Facebook Sued Over Featuring Users in Advertisements

You knew that Facebook uses you in their advertising, right? Those sidebar advertisements (so called “sponsored stories”) where you often see your friends featured – “So and so likes this advertiser” – they do that with your likeness too. We have often ranted about it – now someone is doing something about it: In the case of Fraley v. Facebook plaintiff Fraley and others are suing Facebook in a class action suit, and the Federal court has approved Fraley versus Facebook moving forward. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh agreed that there was a chance that the plaintiffs could win their case based on claims that Facebook has committed fraud, and violated California law with unauthorized use of their image and name, in using Facebook friends’ images and names in advertising displayed in the Facebook sidebar.

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“Take This Lollipop” – What it Is, and Why You Should Watch It

“Take This Lollipop”, the creepy Facebook tour through your personal information, is an excellent example of something we have been trying to pound into your heads all along: putting personal information on the Internet (such as location based check ins) can be dangerous. More to the point: most people have no idea how much personal information they really have revealed online, and how easy it is to track them down, stalking them, and worse. “Take this Lollipop” is technically a Facebook app, which is how (and why) it asks for you to log in using Facebook Connect, something that we also advise against.