Are there good reasons to leave FaceBook?

Sure there are!

However, there are probably as many good reasons to stay.

And yet, for the good reasons to stay, there are genuine concerns, not only with governmental agencies worldwide, but with FaceBook itself.

It IS possible to almost wholesale “lock down” your FaceBook account, but one must decide if those actions are worth it, or not.

Further, another option is, that one could delete everything that could be deleted from FB – likes, comments, posts, etc. – and make invisible those things that cannot be deleted.

Of course, there’s no reason one could not have more than one FB account, either.

However, with all this, it might be wise to consider the ultimate in security, which was proposed several years ago: Public Key Encryption.

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Leaving Facebookistan

May 24, 2012

Posted by Steve Coll

Welcome to FaceBookistan! You are now leaving FaceBookistan.

I established a Facebook account in 2008. My motivation was ignoble: I wanted to distribute my journalism more widely. I have acquired since then just over four thousand “friends”—in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, the Middle East, and of course, closer to home. I have discovered the appeal of Facebook’s community—for example, the extraordinary emotional support that swells in virtual space when people come together online around a friend’s illness or life celebrations.Through its bedrock appeals to friendship, community, public identity, and activism—and its commercial exploitation of these values—Facebook is an unprecedented synthesis of corporate and public spaces. The corporation’s social contract with users is ambitious, yet neither its governance system nor its young ruler seem trustworthy. Then came this month’s initial public offeringof stock—a chaotic and revealing event—which promises to put the whole enterprise under even greater pressure.There are many reasons to be

Congratulations, Mark Zuckerberg! And welcome to the 1% of the 1% class!

Is it clear enough that Wall Street denizens like neither FaceBook or Mr. Zuckerberg?

They bitched, moaned, groaned, griped, carped and complained about his attire.

Now, the stock of his company is tanking, and readers will recall the title of an earlier post which asked “How is FaceBook’s IPO like Erectile Dysfunction?”

To be certain, this is not a reflection upon Mr. Zuckerberg’s character, but rather a form of criticism of his company’s business model. More specifically, it is the demonstrated lack of a concrete, long-term profit-making revenue stream which has many analysts concerned about the firm’s long-term viability.

By the way, based on 2009 tax year filing data, the Internal Revenue Service says an Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) of $343,927 or more, will put you in the top 1 percent of taxpayers.

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Mark Zuckerberg earns $1.1 billion from selling Facebook shares

By Salvador Rodriguez

May 22, 2012, 5:35 p.m.

Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday completed the transaction of the 30.2 million shares he sold in Facebook’s IPO Friday.

The shares he disposed of sold for $37.58 a piece, bringing him a cool $1.1 billion. But despite all that money, the Facebook CEO will be

How is FaceBook’s IPO like Erectile Dysfunction?

{UPDATE: Tuesday, 22 May 2012 – 2d story added}

Read on, to find out why.

(Oh, and please, dear reader, don’t make me spell it out why.)

And, as an interesting note aside, Mr. Zuckerberg was married yesterday.

Here’s wishing him and his bride all the best.

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Nasdaq ‘embarrassed’ over Facebook IPO

By Telis Demos in New York, May 20, 2012 10:12 pm

Nasdaq OMX‘s chief executive admitted he was “embarrassed” by the delay in the opening trade of Facebook’s initial public offering and revealed that the exchange was in talks with regulators over potentially millions of dollars of customer claims.

Bob Greifeld said on Sunday that the 20-minute delay in trading of Facebook’s $16bn offering on Friday had been caused by a millisecond systems blip due to the largest IPO auction “in the history of mankind”.

The exchange has found itself in the spotlight after Facebook failed to deliver a first-day “pop” to investors, instead almost falling below its issuing price of $38. The shares, having risen briefly, quickly fell away to close the day with a gain of just 0.6 per cent, at $38.23.

As a result of the trading delay, Nasdaq was left with a position in Facebook shares that it was forced to liquidate, according to its own rules, generating $10m for the group. It plans to use that money, plus potentially more, to resolve disputes related to 30m shares that may have received improper trades.

It has requested approval from

Whoah, Nellie! FTC Investigation into @FaceBook’s @Instagram buyout may delay IPO

It’s entirely unusual for so many people to voluntarily relinquish so much private information. As well, FaceBook has deliberately deceived many people with their  (lack of) “privacy” policy. In this information era, people are becoming the commodity. But, it’s always been true, that if you don’t want folks to know about it, don’t share it.

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Probe may delay Facebook Instagram deal

May 10, 2012 7:13 pm

By April Dembosky in San Francisco

The United States Federal Trade Commission will be investigating FaceBook’s US$1Billion buyout of Instagram. The logos of the Facebook (L) and Instagram (C) apps are pictured on an IPhone in Cologne, Germany, 09 April 2012.The social network Facebook, flush with cash as the company steers toward public trading scooped up the Instagram mobile photo-sharing application for about 1 billion dollars in cash and stock, on 09 April 2012. San Francisco, USA, based Instagram, with more than 30 million users, is one of the most popular free photo-sharing application on Apple’s App store. EPA/Rolf Vennenbernd

A competition probe into Facebook’s $1bn acquisition of photo-sharing service Instagram threatens to postpone the closure of the deal beyond the second quarter, the target set by the company in its initial public offering documents.

The Federal Trade Commission has launched the investigation, according to two people familiar with the matter, and has already begun collecting information from at least one of the social network’s largest competitors. The process could also further slow Facebook’s already lagging mobile strategy.

The competition probe – routine for any deal more than $66m – is likely to take six to 12 months, according to several experts. But Facebook said in its IPO documents last month that it expected the deal to close in the second quarter.

“That’s terrifically optimistic,” said David Balto, a former policy director at the FTC who now works as an anti-trust lawyer.

Competition experts expect that the Instagram merger will ultimately be approved, but they believe regulators will apply close scrutiny to the deal because of the steep price that Facebook paid and the high profile of the companies.

“They’re going to want to take some months to investigate and understand the market and other players,” Mark Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School, said. “And there may be more parties with an interest in submitting information.”

Facebook has acknowledged that

Big Name Retailers abandon FaceBook during IPO period

News of FaceBook‘s February 1, 2012 filing for a $5Billion IPO (Initial Public Offering) status has Wall Street investors salivating, if not outright champing at the bit for an actionable piece of of that pie. With an estimated net worth of $17.5Billion, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whom at age 28 is one of – if not the – world’s youngest billionaires, could at least double his personal net worth.

With an estimated 845 million active users, and offices in 15 nations, among online tech giants such as Google, Twitter, and the soon-to-be-defunct MySpace, FaceBook continues to dominate the  SoMe (Social Media) market.

As many may already know, FaceBook neither provides a marketable product or service, and their solitary claim to market value lies in harvesting demographic data from those who establish free FaceBook accounts – which also continues to be a corporate sore spot because of privacy rights concerns. While advertising revenue for the company accounts for their majority income, their “click-though” rate – the percentage of which site visitors click on an advertisement – remains the lowest in the online advertising industry, at 0.04% (400/1,000,000). Standing in stark contrast is Google’s 8% click-through rate, while MySpace’s click-through rate of 0.1% still surpasses that of rival FaceBook.

Video advertising, however, remains a FaceBook strong suit. A study conducted in 2010 found that more than 40% of those who viewed the advertising videos watched the entire video, while the industry average was 25%.

Pundits suggest that the technologically savvy younger demographic uses ad-blocking software, and ignores advertising, whereas an older, more mature demographic may not be aware of such add-on features.

Now, amidst the opportunity and risk, traditional retailers and eTailers have slowly begun to abandon their FaceBook presence.

This is not good news for potential investors.

Retailers Shut Facebook Storefonts Amid Apathy

By Ashley Lutz – Feb 16, 2012 11:00 PM CT

Enlarge image

A shop in Tahrir Square is spray painted with the word Facebook in Cairo, Egypt. Photographer: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

Last April, Gamestop Corp. (GME) opened a store on Facebook to generate sales among the 3.5 million-plus customers who’d declared themselves “fans” of the video game retailer. Six months later, the store was quietly shuttered.

Gamestop has company. Over the past year, Gap Inc., J.C. Penney (JCP) Co. and Nordstrom (JWN) Inc. have all