Internet, Social Networking | featured news

Facebook's reach is wide but not deep. Few users surveyed in an Associated Press-CNBC poll say they click on the site's ads or buy the virtual goods that make money for it.

With so much money going into social media as a marketing and branding tool, it’s hard for businesses to discern the true value that their social media efforts are bringing. How much are they really getting when someone posts a tweet about them or mentions them on Facebook? Are they getting real value or is it all just another intangible to throw into the advertising budget like billboard signs and television ads?

SocialCode, a social media advertising firm and subsidiary of The Washington Post Co., announced Thursday that it has hired 15 members of the engineering team from the social news site Digg. In an interview with The Washington Post, SocialCode chief executive Laura O’Shaughnessy said that the engineers will be working on products that compile and analyze data from social networks’ open graphs to help companies glean more information about their customers. (O’Shaughnessy is the daughter of Washington Post Co. chairman Donald E. Graham.)

Facebook took another step toward its goal of being a platform for developers Wednesday, by announcing that it will launch its own App Center, a single location for the platform’s many applications. The company also announced that it will begin supporting paid apps, a program that it is offering to developers in a beta test. (Right now, developers can have in-app payments on the network, but all applications have been free to access.)

Facebook has raked in billions and will make a splash when its stock hits the open market next week. So, what are folks on Wall Street concerned about? Mark Zuckerberg's hoodie, apparently.

Officials from Twitter are looking into what appears to be 50,000 email and password combinations posted to Pastebin earlier this week. After a brief analysis, the list consists of 20,000 duplicates, many suspended spam accounts, and unlinked user name and password combinations. No person or group has claimed responsibility for the leak.

Facebook Inc's initial public offering pitch played to some bad reviews in New York, so for its Boston audience on Tuesday, the 30-minute video was scrapped and the company took more questions from analysts and potential investors.

This is a novel way to generate revenue from non-intrusive advertising, and could offer much more value to brand advertisers than just mobile display ads slapped in the faces of users.

How to put all this into a Facebook valuation? To justify the big numbers being tossed around – $100bn and up – several things must happen in the next five to seven years. The business needs to become much less capital intensive (inclusive of acquisitions) over time, as Google and Microsoft have done. That is the easy part. But margins must also stay near today’s level of about 50 per cent – which would be uncharted territory. And sales would have to grow at least sixfold in this period.

With new food, revamped decor and an embrace of Twitter and mommy blogs, McDonald’s has returned from the brink of a public-relations nightmare.