Just as you were thinking, Facebook won’t sell my personal information.
Profiles, status updates and messages all include a mother lode of voluntarily provided information. The social media site is using it to help advertisers find exactly who they want to reach. Privacy watchdogs are aghast.
Julee Morrison has been obsessed with Bon Jovi since she was a teenager.
So when paid ads for fan sites started popping up on the 41-year-old Salt Lake City blogger’s Facebook page, she was thrilled. She described herself as a “clicking fool,” perusing videos and photos of the New Jersey rockers.
Then it dawned on Morrison why all those Bon Jovi ads appeared every time she logged on to the social networking site.
“Facebook is reading my profile, my interests, the people and pages I am ‘friends’ with, and targeting me,” Morrison said. “It’s brilliant social media but it’s absolutely creepy.”
For Facebook users, the free ride is over.
For years, the privately held company founded by Mark Zuckerberg in a Harvard dorm room put little effort into ad sales, focusing instead on making its service irresistible to users. It worked. Today more than 600 million people have Facebook accounts. The average user spends seven hours a month posting photos, chatting with friends, swapping news links and sending birthday greetings to classmates.
This article is more about investment in stock, however I think it should be included on this site because of the general public’s limited view point about Google being the only search engine.
Google’s earnings came as a huge blow to the internet giant, as rising costs and falling margins led to an important selloff in the stock driving its price down to values not seen since October 2010. A management reshuffling, with co-founder Larry Page taking the helm from Eric Schmidt after a decade, and the questioning of its dominance by competitors, from Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook to Microsoft’s Bing, have cast shadows of doubt over Google’s future. Analysts and experts, though, seem to agree that higher costs are a near-term burden which will result in the realization of growth potential in the near-future.
Despite impressive top-line growth, Google’s stock fell 8.33% since it posted its first quarter earnings erasing about $15 billion in market cap. Apart from missing EPS expectations by two cents, posting adjusted earnings of $8.08 per share, investors were worried that Google is spending too much money. Operating expenses were up 56% to $2.84 billion, traffic acquisition costs (TACs) were up almost 20%, and margins fell to 37.6% from 41% in the first quarter of 2010. Bloomberg even noted that the company went on a “hiring binge” after Google announced it had added 1,900 people to its payroll in the quarter and raised salaries by 10%. “The concern is that the expense discipline may be leaving as Eric Schmidt steps away,” a Benchmark Co analyst told Bloomberg. (Read Google Misses Estimates, Triggers Sell Off).
