Facebook May Announce Deal Results Tuesday

From Facebook to Google, Silicon Valley frowns on flashy spending

(NEWSER) - Facebook's staff may be full of zillionaires, but don't expect Ferraris in the parking lot. Silicon Valley, where almost 14% of homes earn more than $200,000 per year, is deeply opposed to conspicuous consumption—hence Mark Zuckerberg's iconic hoodies and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's underground house. "The message here is, ‘Keep shipping product,'" an insider tells the New York Times . "If someone buys a fancy car and posts a picture of it, they get ridiculed and berated." More»

Mark Zuckerberg tops it, along with other tech execs

(NEWSER) - Vanity Fair put another feather in Mark Zuckerberg’s cap today, naming him to the top spot in its “ New Establishment ” list for the second year in a row. What’s the “New Establishment” you ask? Well, in the magazine’s words, it’s “an innovative new breed of buccaneering visionaries, engineering prodigies, and entrepreneurs.” That clear things up? Didn’t think so. More»

Facebook founder tops Steve Jobs, Rupert Murdoch

(NEWSER) - Frighteningly enough, Mark Zuckerberg tops Vanity Fair 's list of this year's most influential people of the Information Age. The top 5 of its 100:

1. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook: His company is valued at around $25 billion, has more than 500 million members, runs 176 billion banner ads a month, and is looking at $2 billion in revenue this year.
2. Steve Jobs, Apple: He's already saved the music business, now he's looking to do the same for the publishing industry with the iPad. And sales of his market-dominating iPhone will likely top $20 billion this year.

'They're mining our privacy for profits'

(NEWSER) - Stephen Colbert managed to get serious yesterday as he blasted the "invasive" personal data mining undertaken by Google and Facebook to "sell our private lives to the highest bidder." The harsh dig came at the end of a long hilarious riff about how Facebook users now must totally change their lifestyle, stop communicating with people and radically alter their looks to dodge new facial recognition programs to protect their privacy. In other words, we must morph into "disfigured nameless loners," snorts Colbert. More»

Social network crowds out Google and Yahoo for first time

(NEWSER) - Facebook got a big present this holiday season: It was the No. 1 US website on Christmas and on Christmas Eve. Facebook, which lagged behind Google in second place last year, trounced that site and rival Yahoo—though the search engines generated more traffic throughout the balance of the year. And social networking pulled off a Christmas miracle, ReadWriteWeb notes, despite the recent controversy over new privacy settings. More»