Meet Nick Bergus. He’s a pretty cool guy who once linked to an odd product on Facebook as a bit of a joke — a 55-gallon barrel of lube from Amazon.com. Ha ha, funny, right? But the joke was on him, as Facebook’s algorithms started featuring his smiling face in personalized ads featuring the giant barrel of lube. From there, his story spread — first to his personal blog, then to Gawker, with an amazing headline. Now, Bergus’ somewhat embarrassing (but admittedly kind of awesome) tale is on the front page of the New York Times. All because he once linked to a giant barrel of lube. (photo by Stephen Mally/NYT)
About time: Facebook now allows fan page owners to schedule their posts and give team member roles to users — and as a result, taking away some of the usefulness of dedicated apps like HootSuite. Took ‘em long enough.
Pinterest already has become an attractive destination in particular for Facebook-ers who are looking for the thrill of a small startup versus working for the big company. Pinterest has about 40 employees. Five of the top positions are filled by former Facebook employees.
Key sign you’re not cool anymore? All the hipsters at your company move on, like moths to a light source. (thanks Greg Bufithis)
cnet:
This new Facebook phone: Why would anyone want one?
Rumors have it that the social network is again working on some sort of phone. But what could Facebook put into that phone to make it a must-buy?
What would you like to see in a Facebook phone?
A screensaver with Mark Zuckerberg’s face constantly staring at us.
Employees of Facebook and several engineers who have been sought out by recruiters there, as well as people briefed on Facebook’s plans, say the company hopes to release its own smartphone by next year. These people spoke only on condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing their employment or relationships with Facebook.
The company has already hired more than half a dozen former Apple software and hardware engineers who worked on the iPhone, and one who worked on the iPad, the employees and those briefed on the plans said.
In related news, we’re going to give Zuck one of our kidneys so he has even more information to sell to marketers.
In her last days, my mother occasionally became confused....
”The reporter...
I can’t add much to what’s already been (and will be) ...
One of the perks of being an early employee...
Over the last 90 days, the Digg...
#FMMDI (at 30 Rockefeller Plaza)
Facebook’s stock sucking again, but that’s not the half of it — reports are coming out that two companies that execute trades for traders have lost between $60 and $70 million on botched trades during the Facebook IPO. It gets worse: NASDAQ is legally only liable to cover $3 million in botched trades in a given month (though NASDAQ is trying to get permission from the SEC to pay up to $10 million), so they might have lost a ton of money because NASDAQ screwed up.
You sir make a horrible title.. It should be AWESOME SPECTACULAR PLUGIN RAGES THROUGH FACEBOOK!Dru Mundorff, the creator of LilyJade, a shady Facebook app • Defending his idea in the comments of Russell Brandom’s BuzzFeed article talking about how shady it is. The cross-platform browser plugin, which tricks users into installing it, replaces all the ads on other sites with his. Classy. He’s made a quarter-million bucks off the thing in just two weeks, has already drawn a comment from Wikipedia, a cease-and-desist from Facebook, is for sale on hacker forums, and and as Brandom points out, what he’s doing is gray-area but legal, since users are installing it themselves. Great. Be careful what you click, guys. This is a new generation of malware. And it works on nearly everything.
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reuters:
Should Facebook consider a non-advertising model? Perhaps one that gives Facebook Pages extra features and exposure for a monthly fee? A lot of companies would pay for that.