It’s 10pm, do you know where your data is?

There is an interesting article from Andy Baio over at Wired that looks at how easy it has become to give total strangers a window into our lives. With the advent of OAuth, people can easily sign up for new services and apps by relying on their Facebook and Google profiles. Instead of filling out a lot of forms and trying to remember a new password, you can just rely on these companies to handle … Continue Reading

Here’s what we REALLY thought about this week’s news (video)

Skyrim is awesome; Pinterest users need to calm the hell down; and Facebook users need to stay away from the gun cabinet.

In this week’s episode of VB Weekly, the VentureBeat writing staff takes a front seat, with a range of our editors and reporter spouting off about the stories they found most interesting.

This week, we’re talking about:

Steve Jobs’ FBI file
the crazy coming features for hit game Skyrim
Facebook’s all-new lightbox for

… Continue Reading

Angry Birds Facebook landing with new power-ups and exclusive levels on Valentine’s Day

Not content with dominating the mobile gaming market, Angry Birds is winging its way to Facebook on Valentine’s Day. Developer Rovio has today revealed some of the features that this Facebook app will be boasting, including brand-new power-ups and exclusive levels.

Angry Birds has been downloaded over 700 million times since its launch in December 2009. The phenomenal success of the game has seen it released across a wide variety of platforms, including iOS, Android, … Continue Reading

Facebook gives us some clues about the next 12 months of Timeline

Facebook product chief Carl Sjogreen gave developers and others a few clues about what to expect from Facebook over the next year.

At the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco today, the Facebook executive laid out the three most important parts of Facebook’s third-party development platform: Open Graph, mobile, and games.

“The point of Open Graph is … to let apps deeply integrate with Facebook and fill out your Timeline and enrich the News … Continue Reading

Facebook woos photographers with new lightbox viewer, launching end of week

Facebook is rolling out its new lightbox photo viewer feature to all 840 million users by the end of this week, a spokesperson for the company has confirmed to VentureBeat. The new display helps make photos more attractive by showing them larger, moving comments off to the side, and graying out the background to minimize distraction.

“The new photo viewer is rolling out to everyone on Facebook and should be available to people worldwide by … Continue Reading

Nexon invades Zynga’s turf with plan to launch Kart Rider on Facebook

Nexon and Zynga are dueling to be the darlings of the new game industry. Nexon got big with free-to-play online games that you download over the web to a computer. Zynga dominates the casual game market on Facebook. Now Nexon is moving in on Facebook with the planned launch of its KartRider Dash game for the social network.

Tokyo-based Nexon, which went public in December, is launching the game as a free-to-play title — where … Continue Reading

Lance Tokuda’s SchoolFeed rounds up $1.75M for fast-growing classmates network

Lance Tokuda was looking for an old high school friend, but instead he found his second big social networking startup. The co-founder of game publisher RockYou happened to find an old acquaintance from high school on Classmates.com, which has more than 60 million users. But when he was going to email her, he found that Classmates.com was going to charge him $60 for that privilege.

There had to be a better way to hook people … Continue Reading

Extole turns regular customers into brand ambassadors, raises $10M

Nearly every company has a social presence these days, but personal recommendations are often a more powerful way to boost sales. If you’ve never heard about a company before, but your friend has, you’ll likely trust her opinion over that of a complete stranger. But keeping track of how much customer referrals really help your business can be hard, so Extole has created a way to track word-of-mouth marketing.

The service seeks to find and … Continue Reading

A change we don’t hate: Facebook updates photo viewer

It seems Facebook has rolled out its new lightbox photo viewer to more people today, and some are saying it’s a ripoff of Google+.

The new feature is similar to the old “theater view” in that it takes the user into a pop-up carousel of photos. What’s new is that Facebook has moved the comments to the right side of the photo and added advertising below the comments field. In order to like or tag … Continue Reading

Be adventurous, swap your home on Love Home Swap’s new Facebook app

If you’re traveling and need a place to stay, there’s a new option that won’t stress your wallet. Home-exchange website Love Home Swap has launched a Facebook application that may introduce a little more serendipity to your life.

The movie “The Holiday” tells the story of two lost women, looking to reconnect with their lives in new places. Kate Winslet, who plays a unlucky-in-love Londoner, switches homes with the uptight Southern Californian, Cameron Diaz. The … Continue Reading

Deleting a photo on Facebook might not be what it seems

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but there seems to be one word Facebook doesn’t understand: “delete.”

When you delete a Facebook image from your profile you’re actually sending a request to Facebook to remove that photo file from its servers. You’d expect the request to be completed in a reasonable amount of time. Ars Technica is reporting, however, that “deleted” photos dating back as far as 2008 are still floating around on … Continue Reading

Facebook’s growth by the numbers (infographic)

Buried in Facebook's 21,890 word registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission are a ton of new facts and figures about the social media company. Since there's a larger-than-usual amount of buzz surrounding Facebook upcoming initial public offering, one of the best ways to cut through the noise is to look at the numbers.

Famous hackers discuss Zuckerberg’s “Hacker Way” comments

In last week’s SEC filing, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg poked a huge hornet’s nest when he referenced “The Hacker Way.”

Some of the pioneers of the hacker ethos and culture have previously defined hacking as having strong connections to tinkering, “playing” with code and systems, and most importantly, absolute freedom.

The kind of freedom those earlier hackers talk about is the freedom to inspect, to look under the hood, to break, to tamper, to share, … Continue Reading

From Google to Facebook, online privacy concerns aren’t going away (infographic)

Ever since Google announced its new, controversial privacy policy two weeks ago, interest in online privacy has spiked as more people question how Google and other companies are managing their data.

Google announced last week that it would change its privacy policy by combining 60 existing policies into one, with the changes going into effect March 1. While simplification of hard-to-read policies is nice, Google attracted criticism because it will now combine user data across … Continue Reading

The free ride is over: Facebook likely adding mobile ads “within weeks”

With Facebook’s financial situation firmly in the spotlight after its IPO filing, the company will finally address the problem of generating revenues from mobile users by introducing mobile ads in the next few weeks.

One of Facebook’s biggest risks Facebook listed in last week’s IPO filing was “mobile,” and the company said it generates no “meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products.” One solution would be to launch a Facebook-branded phone that would … Continue Reading

VBWeekly: IPO, IP-Schmo.

This week we talk about the IPO heard ’round the world, that of Dutch antivirus outfit AVG.

Wait, that’s the IPO y’all were talking about, right?

Of course, we get into some of the nitty gritty gossip around the Facebook IPO, from what the MySpace CEO had to say about it to how Mr. Mark Zuckerberg used some clever contractual maneuvers to maintain control of the company and its board.

And what would VB Weekly … Continue Reading

Facebook worth $94B, private market says

Now that Facebook is fast on its way to becoming a public company, and its financials have been laid bare, there’s just one question that remains unanswered: What is Facebook actually worth?

A private market transaction completed Thursday may provide us with best the answer yet.

One hundred thousand Class B common stock shares were sold for $40 a pop on SharesPost, according to information obtained by Bloomberg News and confirmed by the private capital … Continue Reading

Small business accounting service Xero raises $16.6M

Xero, an online-accounting service for small businesses, announced today it has received $16.6 million in its latest round of funding. PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel participated in the round.

“Xero was started by a few entrepreneurs who struggled to get the right financial information to make business decisions. They set out to build accounting software that caters to small business and accountants,” said Jamie Sutherland (pictured right), Xero’s President of U.S. Operations … Continue Reading