Last week, something turned. We found out that not only are we in a recession, but it started a year ago. Tech layoffs went into overdrive (12,000 at AT&T, 600 at Adobe, 130 at Real Networks), bringing the total unemployed tech workforce to at least 90,000, by our count.

Tags: facebook, recession

Yesterday, reports started circulating about a virulent piece of worm spreading through Facebook. The malicious code isn’t exactly new (it started surfacing in August), but has now been altered to strike social networking websites only and is currently making the rounds on Facebook pretty quickly, it seems. The virus can spread fast because they travel [...]

Not an hour after Google announced the general availability of Friend Connect, Facebook is doing the same for its competing Facebook Connect service. Now any third party website that wants to pull personal data about visitors from Facebook - and send back activity reports to their news feeds - can do so by first filling [...]

Conspiracy theory lovers are going to have a field day with this one: when you try to access Facebook using the Google Chrome browser today, you’ll get a warning that the social network may in fact be a phishing site.
You can still use the site if you click the button to continue, but you can [...]

Every time I scroll through my list of ‘Friends’ on Facebook, I inevitably come to the same (somewhat depressing) conclusion: I have absolutely no idea who many of these people are. This is mostly my fault - my standards have always been pretty low when it comes to accepting inbound requests, and I never kept [...]

Here’s a rumor that won’t go away - Facebook has been quietly searching for a partner to take over their year and a half old classified listings application, and may relaunch as early as the end of December.
According to our sources, Facebook distributed a request-for-proposal to a number of classified sites earlier this year (the [...]

When most private companies reach 500 shareholders, they trigger an SEC rule which effectively treats them like a public company and requires them to some of the same reporting requirements. Google ran into this issue just before it went public. Now Facebook is quickly reaching that same threshold as it continues to hire and allows [...]

Now those phony Nigerians may log on as your “friend.” How Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites are fighting a rise in scams
Remember the associate of that deposed dictator who needed your help transferring a few million dollars from a Swiss bank account? Well, he’s back. And he—or one of his ilk—may show [...]

Earlier today Facebook released details on its new Verified App Program for third party developers.
Basically, application developers (there are 48,000 applications on Facebook today) can apply to become a Verified App. If they pass they get a badge and special placement in the Application directory, plus increased communication limits with users, increased visibility in the [...]