Facebook, Social Networking | featured news

Yes, this again. Facebook on Thursday sent out invitations for a press event that promised to show off the company’s “new home on Android,” which naturally led to fresh speculation about the company’s intention to produce its own Facebook-centric smartphone.

Facebook's stock market debut left founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a paper fortune currently valued at $13 billion -- and a 2012 tax bill of around $1.1 billion.vZuckerberg's whopping tax hit stems from his move last May to increase his stake in Facebook. On the day of Facebook's initial public offering, Zuckerberg exercised a stock option and purchased 60 million Facebook shares at a "strike price" of 6 cents each.

Facebook announced on Monday it is rolling out a new feature so users can reply directly to comments left on their page. Finally.

As if Facebook weren't annoying enough. The Wall Street Journal reports that the social network may adopt Twitter's arguably most tiresome -- and arguably most Corporate -- feature: the hashtag. Facebook is testing the effectiveness of hashtags and is considering adding the categorizing feature to its site, reports the WSJ citing sources familiar with the matter.

Most North Koreans can't access the Internet, and only foreigners can use the country's brand-new 3G cellular network. But the country has still developed its own rudimentary social network -- which you can now see for yourself, thanks to a SXSW panel the Associated Press's Jean Lee gave this weekend.

Clicking those friendly blue "like" buttons strewn across the Web may be doing more than marking you as a fan of Coca-Cola or Lady Gaga. It could out you as gay. It might reveal how you vote.

Last spring, the future for Viddy, a video-sharing Facebook app, seemed as sunny as southern California's skies. Based a block away from Venice Beach, the 30-person startup impressed prospective investors with skyrocketing user growth figures and won funding from them at a $370 million valuation. The tech press hailed it as the "Instagram for video," potentially ripe for a billion-dollar-plus buyout. Justin Bieber wanted to invest — and the pop star eventually did just that.

Sheryl Sandberg's explosive "Lean In" — a muscular manifesto on the gender inequities of the professional world — is being published within weeks of the 50th anniversary of Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique." It's a convergence destined to invite disparaging comparisons, to prompt people to holler about how they knew Betty Friedan and that Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook and one of the most powerful women in the tech world, is no Betty Friedan.

"What we're trying to do is give everyone in the world, the best possible newspaper we can," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said when he stepped onto the stage during a press event in Menlo Park, Calif. on Thursday. A News Feed redesign that focuses on more visual posts, the ability to view content-specific feeds, and consistency between mobile and desktop experiences is the topic of the day.

Nick Bilton of the New York Times Bits blog wrote a post the other day about how despite having grown his number of Facebook subscribers to a healthy 400,000, he noticed that his actual engagement numbers (likes and shares) had plummeted per post into the low double digits. "Something is puzzling on Facebook," he muses.