Free Facebook Chat Smileys and Emoticons

Use the Facebook smileys and emoticons while reconnecting with friends and family on the most popular social networking site online. Emoticon smileys can be used in Facebook chat conversations.

Each emoticon appears by writing the shortcut into the chat box.So here are the "codes" you should type in facebook chat in order to put smileys.

Click Here to Download or Visit

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Anonymous claims that they did not attack Facebook

Contrary to multiple media reports, Anonymous did not attack Facebook, nor did Anonymous claim responsibility for attacking Facebook. Mainstream media simply got the story wrong.

As reported previously, Facebook has confirmed that the temporary outages experienced by Facebook users on May 31 - 2012 was not the result of a DDoS attack. For Anonymous hacktivists, a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack is the preferred method for temporarily disabling websites.

Media outlets based their reports that Anonymous claimed responsibility for taking down Facebook on two distinct tweets from YourAnonNews: One tweet notes 'Looks like good old Facebook is having packet problems' followed by another tweet: 'Oh yeah … RIP Facebook a new sound of tango down...'

Yet celebrating Facebook’s misfortune is not the same as claiming responsibility for that misfortune. In an attempt to clarify the situation, Anonymous has issued a statement denying any responsibility for taking down Facebook, and reassuring the public that Anonymous has no interest in taking down Facebook. The following is an excerpt from that statement:

Anonymous Press Release - We Did NOT Attack Facebook

Friday - June 1, 2012 4:00 PM ET USA

This morning it was reported by many mainstream media outlets that Anonymous had attacked the servers of Facebook and caused interruptions in service in a number of countries. We have investigated these allegations and have found them utterly false and without basis.

As this false report began to go viral in the mainstream media this morning, key Anonymous organizers from all over the world and in many countries gathered in the IRC channels we use to communicate. A quick poll of everyone present, representing a very broad spectrum of the global collective - quickly showed that no one in the actual Anonymous knew anything about an attack on Facebook.

Most showed surprise because we all believed that we had successfully squashed the fail Op Facebook months ago, setting the record straight once and for all. So having determined that no one in Anonymous knew anything about an attack on Facebook, we then turned our attention to the facts. We began with the statement released by Facebook.

In that statement they indicated that they knew what the problem was, what it was that caused these service interruptions in various countries - and that it was an INTERNAL issue caused by a problem with some of their servers. Not only did Anonymous NOT attack Facebook, but there was no attack at all. Facebook IT's were just having a bad day.

So what happened here? How did mainstream media get it so completely wrong? A careful analysis of the events this morning tell the story. It's a story of lies, deceit - and mainstream media failing in it's most basic journalistic obligations. None of which surprises us much.

Finally let us, while we have your attention - address the Anonymous attitude towards Facebook. The fact is that Anonymous has a love-hate relationship with Facebook. While we enjoy the power of social networking media to do our work, bring positive change to the world and spread our message - we utterly despise the current management of Facebook and it's evil anti-privacy and anti-anonymity policies.

We are also not at all happy about their cooperation with law enforcement and intelligence agencies in tyrannical countries around the world, including the USA. Facebook has much to be ashamed of, and has earned the hatred of all human rights and information activists.

But that said, they ARE a personal and social media platform. One that has been used by these same activists to bring about much freedom and justice in this world. Anonymous has certain core principles, and one of those is that we NEVER attack the media - even media we strongly disagree with. There is NO Op Facebook, and there NEVER was. Anonymous did NOT attack Facebook, and we NEVER will.

SIGNED -- Anonymous

The fact that multiple mainstream media outlets would jump to the conclusion that Anonymous was responsible for bringing Facebook down speaks to the awesome power the international Internet hacktivist collective known as Anonymous currently wields in contemporary affairs.

Source: Airdemon

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How to learn how much time you spend on Facebook? [Chrome Extension]

Facebook Runner is a browser extension which displays how much time you spend on Facebook and Internet. 

After installing, it starts running only if Facebook tab is active.

Features:

  * Displays and saves how much time you spend on Facebook and Internet.

  * Can be integrated to your Facebook page.

  * Saves timer values for continuing after browser restart.

 * Several timer resetting options: Daily, Every 7 days, Every 30 days, On startup, Never and Manually.

  * Details page for viewing statistics.

  * Timer view format can be shortened. 

  * Supports English and Turkish languages.

Go here and install it!

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Facebooks IPO: One of world's largest

NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook found more than enough friends.

The world's definitive online social network said Thursday that it raised $16 billion for itself and its early investors in an initial public stock offering that values Facebook at $104 billion. That's more than Amazon.com and other well-known companies such as Kraft, Walt Disney and McDonald's.

It's a big windfall for a company that began eight years ago with no way to make money.

Electronic screens inside the Nasdaq stock market announce the listing of Facebook shares before the start of trading, Friday, May 18, 2012 in New York. The world's definitive online social network raised $16 billion in an initial public offering that values the company at $104 billion. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

Facebook priced its IPO at $38 per share on Thursday, at the top of expectations. Now, regular investors will have a chance to buy stock in Facebook for the first time. The stock will begin trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market sometime Friday morning. The ticker symbol will be FB.

Facebook's offering is the culmination of a year's worth of Internet IPOs that began last May with LinkedIn Corp. Since then, a steady stream of startups focused on the social side of the Web has gone public, with varying degrees of success. It all led up to Facebook, the company that's come to define social networking by getting 900 million people around the world to share everything from photos of their pets to their deepest thoughts.

It has done so while managing to become one of the few profitable Internet companies to go public recently. It had net income of $205 million in the first three months of 2012, on revenue of $1.06 billion. In all of 2011, it earned $1 billion, up from $606 million a year earlier. That's a far cry from 2007, when it posted a net loss of $138 million and revenue of $153 million.

"They could have gone public in 2009 at a much lower price," said Nick Einhorn, research analyst at IPO investment advisory firm Renaissance Capital. "They waited as long as they could to go public, so it makes sense that it's a very large offering."

Facebook Inc.'s valuation is the third-highest in an IPO, according to Dealogic, a provider of financial data. Only two Chinese banks, Agricultural Bank of China in 2010 and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China in 2006, have been worth more. They were worth $133 billion and $132 billion, respectively. By another measure —the amount raised— Facebook ranks third among U.S. IPOs. The largest was Visa, which raised $17.9 billion in 2008. No. 2 was Enel, a power company, and No. 4 was General Motors, according to Renaissance Capital.

The $38 share price is the price at which the investment banks arranging the offering will sell the stock to their clients. In an IPO, the banks buy the stock first from the company and the early investors and then sell to the public. If extra shares reserved to cover additional demand are sold as part of the transaction, Facebook and its early investors stand to reap as much as $18.4 billion.

For a company that was born in a Harvard dormitory and went on to reimagine online communication, the stock sale means more money to build on the features and services it offers users. It means an infusion of money to hire the best engineers to work at its sprawling Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, or in New York City, where it opened an engineering office last year.

And it means early investors, who took a chance seeding the young social network with start-up funds six, seven and eight years ago, can reap big rewards. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who sits on Facebook's board of directors, invested $500,000 in the company in 2004. He's selling nearly 17 million of his shares in the IPO, which means he'll get some $640 million. He will hold on to about 28 million shares, worth $1.06 billion.

The offering values Facebook, whose 2011 revenue was $3.7 billion, at as much as $104 billion. The sky-high valuation has its skeptics, who worry about signs of a slowdown and Facebook's ability to grow in the mobile space when it was created with desktop computers in mind. Rival Google Inc., whose revenue stood at $38 billion last year, has a market capitalization of $207 billion.

"There seems to be somewhat of a hype around the stock offering," says Gartner analyst Brian Blau.

That may be an understatement.

Facebook's IPO dominated media coverage in the weeks and days leading up to the event. CEO Mark Zuckerberg's hoodie made headlines when he wore it to a meeting with investors as did General Motors' decision this week to stop advertising on the site —and rival Ford's affirmation that its Facebook ads have been effective.

There are more than a few reasons for the exuberance. First, there's Facebook's sheer size and high profile. The company grew from a college-only social network to an Internet phenomenon embraced by legions of people, from teenagers to grandmothers to pro-democracy activists in the Middle East.

Secondly, it's personal.

"It's probably one of the first times there has been an IPO where everyone sort of has a stake in the outcome," Blau says. While most Facebook users won't see a penny from the offering, they are all intimately familiar with the company.

And then there's Zuckerberg, who turned 28 on Monday. He has emerged as the latest in a lineage of Silicon Valley prodigies who are alternately hailed for pushing the world in new directions and reviled for overstepping their bounds. He counted the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs among his mentors, and he became one of the world's youngest billionaires — at least on paper — well before Facebook went public. A dramatized and less-than-flattering version of Facebook's founding was the subject of a Hollywood movie that won three Academy Awards last year, propelling Zuckerberg even further into the public spotlight.

Though Zuckerberg is selling about 30 million shares, he will remain Facebook's largest shareholder. Even after the IPO, he will own 503.6 million shares, or 32 percent of Facebook's total shares. At the $38 share price, his stake in the company is worth $19.1 billion. Zuckerberg will control the company with 56 percent of its voting stock as a result of agreements he has with other shareholders who promise to vote his way.

The set-up helps to ensure that he and other executives keep control as the demands of Wall Street for short-term returns exert new pressures on the company.

True to form, Zuckerberg and Facebook's engineers are ringing in the IPO on their own terms. The company is holding an overnight "hackathon" Thursday, where engineers stay up writing programming code to come up with new features for the site. On Friday morning, Zuckerberg will ring the Nasdaq opening bell from Facebook's headquarters a continent away.

Source: The Associated Press

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Facebook IPO: Stock jumps in public debut

NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook is updating its status to "public company" as its stock jumps in its debut on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

The stock rose to $42.05 on Friday morning. CEO Mark Zuckerberg smiled as rang the opening bell from Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Surrounded by cheering Facebook employees and wearing his signature hoodie, the 28-year-old pushed the button that signals the opening of the stock market in New York.

On Thursday, Facebook and the investment bankers arranging the IPO settled on a price of $38 per share. The company and its early investors raised $16 billion in the offering, which valued Facebook at $104 billion. That makes Facebook the most valuable U.S. company to ever go public.

Now, the stock market will assign a dollar value to Facebook that will rise and fall with investor whims. It will be subject to broad economic forces as well as how much profit it earns from one quarter to the next. But Facebook is one of the rare companies whose IPO transcends Wall Street's money lust to become a cultural touchstone for the way technology is reshaping our lives. Since its start as a scrappy network for college students, Facebook has come to define social networking by getting 900 million people around the world to share everything from photos of their pets to their deepest thoughts.

It has done so while managing to become one of the few profitable Internet companies to go public recently. It had net income of $205 million in the first three months of 2012, on revenue of $1.06 billion. In all of 2011, it earned $1 billion, up from $606 million a year earlier. That's a far cry from 2007, when it posted a net loss of $138 million and revenue of $153 million. The company makes most of its money from advertising. It also takes a cut from the money people spend on virtual items in Facebook games such as "FarmVille."

Facebook's public debut marks a new milestone in the history of the Internet — and the people who use it. In 1995, Netscape Communications' IPO gave people their first chance to invest in a company whose graphical Web browser made the Internet more engaging and easier to navigate. Its hotly anticipated IPO lit the fuse that ignited the dot-com boom and culminated five years later in a devastating bust that obliterated the notion that the Internet had somehow hatched a new economy where making money no longer matter.

It took Google Inc.'s IPO in 2004 to prove just how profitable a well-run Internet company with a disruptive idea can be. In the process, the Internet search leader is forcing other industries to adapt to a new order where people have come to expect to be able to find just about anything they want by entering a few words into a box on any device with an Internet connection.

Facebook's IPO underscores an Internet evolution that has made the understanding of connections among people as important as Google's massive index of Web links. Now that Facebook will be under greater pressure to sell more advertising to bring in more revenue, this IPO also cast a brighter light on how just how much revealing information that people have been sharing the past few years without fully understanding the implications.

Facebook's IPO almost certainly will enrich other up-and-coming entrepreneurs as Zuckerberg uses the company's trove of cash and stock to buy other startups in an effort to being in other talented engineers and promising technology. That's what has been doing for years. Since it went public in 2004, Google has spent $10.2 billion buying nearly 200 other companies. Those figures don't include Google's still-pending $12.5 billion acquisition of cellphone maker Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc., which is still awaiting regulatory approval in China.

Zuckerberg's biggest deal came so far when he agreed to buy Instagram, a maker of a popular mobile app for photos, for $1 billion. Because most of the deal is being paid for in stock, Instagram is already getting richer. Based on Facebook's IPO price of $38 per share, Instagram is in line to receive nearly $1.2 billion.

Though Zuckerberg rang the Nasdaq opening bell from California, people outside the stock market in Times Square snapped photos of a big blue Facebook sign that lit up the building. Some of them used their smart phones to checked in to the Nasdaq on Facebook. Frederick Nolde, who was visiting from Richmond, Va., said he bought 100 shares through the online brokerage eTrade.

He thinks the company is worth $100 billion. "I think Google is a good comparison and it's worth $200 to 300 billion. The real question is how they do in mobile. if they can figure that out they'll do well."

Source: The Associated Press

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Abraham Lincoln Filed a Patent For Facebook First

You can’t make this stuff up, folks. Intrepid reporter (or just nosey historian) Nate St. Pierre did some digging in the grand old town of Springfield, IL where he took a tour of the Lincoln Museum and stumbled onto the “Springfield Gazette”, which was a paper entirely about Abraham Lincoln:

The whole Springfield Gazette was one sheet of paper, and it was all about Lincoln. Only him. Other people only came into the document in conjunction with how he experienced life at that moment. If you look at the Gazette picture above, you can see his portrait in the upper left-hand corner. See how the column of text under him is cut off on the left side? Stupid scanned picture, I know, ugh. But just to the left of his picture, and above that column of text, is a little box. And in that box you see three things: his name, his address, and his profession (attorney).

The first column underneath his picture contains a bunch of short blurbs about what’s going on in his life at the moment – work he recently did, some books the family bought, and the new games his boys made up. In the next three columns he shares a quote he likes, two poems, and a short story about the Pilgrim Fathers. I don’t know where he got them, but they’re obviously copied from somewhere. In the last three columns he tells the story of his day at the circus and tiny little story about his current life on the prairie.

Yep, this sounds familiar. A profile picture? Sounds kind of like Facebook, eh?

Lincoln tried to patent this system for updating people, but was rejected:

Lincoln was requesting a patent for “The Gazette,” a system to “keep People aware of Others in the Town.” He laid out a plan where every town would have its own Gazette, named after the town itself. He listed the Springfield Gazette as his Visual Appendix, an example of the system he was talking about. Lincoln was proposing that each town build a centrally located collection of documents where “every Man may have his own page, where he might discuss his Family, his Work, and his Various Endeavors.”

He went on to propose that “each Man may decide if he shall make his page Available to the entire Town, or only to those with whom he has established Family or Friendship.” Evidently there was to be someone overseeing this collection of documents, and he would somehow know which pages anyone could look at, and which ones only certain people could see (it wasn’t quite clear in the application). Lincoln stated that these documents could be updated “at any time deemed Fit or Necessary,” so that anyone in town could know what was going on in their friends’ lives “without being Present in Body.”

Could you imagine every single person in your town having their own newspaper? That would have been a lot of dead trees. But there you have it, Abraham Lincoln out-Zucked Mark Zuckerberg…167 years ago.

Source: The Next Web

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Reddit Co-Founder Not Investing in Facebook Due to CISPA Support

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian visited CNN today and discussed Facebook’s upcoming IPO, saying that he’ll be holding off on investing in the company due to its support of CISPA.

Ohanian, whose thoughts are very respected in the tech community, had some interesting insight into how Mark Zuckerberg might have to change his ways once the company goes public. 

CISPA recently passed the House and is awaiting review by the Senate. President of the United States, Barack Obama is said to be willing to veto the bill if necessary.


Do you guys even know what is CISPA?
As the real world shifts continuously further into the virtual one, more and more issues of legality and Internet rights come into question.  Though the online world may be steeped in the sharing of data and information, issues of privacy and protection of knowledge arise constantly.  If you’re preparing for your future as a paralegal, it’s important to understand the potential infringement of rights as the public struggles to protect personal identity from the throes of bureaucracy.  After the SOPA bill outraged millions this past fall, it seemed for a time that the threat of outrageous Internet privacy violations had passed.  But now, congress has unleashed a new bill for review, and this one is a bigger beast entirely.  The name of the current game is CISPA, and it has little to do with copyright infringement, and everything to do with the government tracking you through the Internet.  As more people conduct their work, relationships, and lives online, the future is sure to be packed with issues of what the government can and cannot do or see online.  So as you prepare for your paralegal future, get to know CISPA, because more and more legality issues might start to look a lot like this one. Click on the photo to view as large!

Info graphic Created by: Paralegal.net

News Source: The Next Web

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Facebook adds names to Timeline Friend photos

Facebook has made another minor change to users’ Timeline profiles, incorporating a new design for Friend listings that include both a person’s name and profile photo, making it easier for other users to make new connections via their existing connections.

The update appears to have rolled out over the past 24 hours, ensuring that when a user visits their friend’s Facebook profile, the Friends box immediately draws the their attention:

Before, friends were listed but a user had to mouseover the person’s image to view their name on the resulting popup.

You could argue that Facebook’s new design has elements of Microsoft’s Windows Phone/Metro interface, a layout that is both simple but effective at encouraging users to click through to other people’s profiles and expand connections.

Facebook recently increased the size of Timeline profile images, just days after Google updated Google+ profiles to sport a larger photo. It appears that Facebook has been working to make the most of images on the social network, helping with the identification of its users and driving interaction between them.

Source: The Next Web

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Facebook meets enemies

A new app is set to challenge the friendly appearance of users’ Facebook pages. EnemyGraph will allow creating enemy lists, posting them on your profile and even declaring war.

A sign with the "like" symbol stands in front of the Facebook
headquarters on February 1, 2012 in Menlo Park, California
(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images / AFP)

The initiative was prompted by numerous requests from Facebook users who have been asking for a ‘dislike' button to the website.

Users of EnemyGraph app will be able to become 'Enemies' and ‘Archenemies’ with people, pages, and groups. You can also highlight ‘Social Dissonance’ with your friends. The app will even allow declaring war on any person or company that has a Facebook profile.

The Enemies list will appear on your profile and will be visible to other users of the application.

The creator of the app Dean Terry of the University of Texas at Dallas called the app a 'social media blasphemy' and thought that Facebook would remove the app, The Daily Mail reports.

“We give them a couple of weeks at best before they shut us down,” Terry says.

So far no action has been taken by the administrators and the app is there for anyone interested. Trending enemies now include the Westboro Baptist Church, Twilight Series by Stephenie Meyer, racism, and tomatoes.

Source: RT

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Facebook Working to Permanently Remove all Deleted Photos

Facebook has confirmed that over the next two months it will finally fix an issue that has left a number of deleted photos live and available on its system.

Currently, not all photos that are deleted by users are gone completely as some can still be seen on the social network by anyone with a direct link to the image, as Ars Technica reports. This is an issue which has not been fixed more than three years after first being highlighted, and it continues to frustrate users who seek to remove embarrassing, private or unsuitable images from the social network.

The company says that by April it will complete the migration of all users’ images to a new content management system on which every photo deleted by a user will be removed from Facebook’s servers and the service permanently. According to Facebook, that entire deletion process will be carried out within 45 days of the initial removal request.

A spokesman confirmed that its initial efforts to fix the problem fell flat due to issues with its previous system:

[The new] process is nearly complete and there is only a very small percentage of user photos still on the old system awaiting migration. We expect this process to be completed within the next month or two, at which point we will verify the migration is complete and we will disable all the old content.

The systems we used for photo storage a few years ago did not always delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable period of time even though they were immediately removed from the site.

It seems almost unbelievable that this issue could have gone unfixed by Facebook for such a significant amount of time, particularly given the number of requests and concerned emails that Ars Technica claims to have received since it first covered the issue in 2009.

It cites a number of examples, including a man whose friend posted photographed his toddler crawlign naked in his garden, as proof of the continued problems. While the photo of the toddler was deleted in April 2008, the original link is still live and the image can be seen almost four years after it was ‘removed’.

More interestingly, links to a number of undeleted images in the original 2009 article were permanently removed by Facebook without comment of confirmation. This action clearly shows that someone at the social network was aware of the issue and took action to mitigate the situation by removing the links, which could make the issue appear to be remedied.

As Ars Technica rightly claims, we will have to wait and see if Facebook will finally deliver on its promise to put this very basic user right into action.

Source: The Next Web

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Analysis: A sobering look at Facebook

(Reuters) - It's the year's hottest initial public offering, but some wealth managers find themselves having a hard time recommending Facebook to their clients.

The world's biggest social network is expected to seek a $75 billion to $100 billion valuation in its IPO, the most anticipated stock offering from Silicon Valley since Google Inc went public in 2004.

At Granite Investment Advisors in New Hampshire, Chief Investment Officer Scott Schermerhorn has already been fielding queries from clients eager to get in on the action.

"We had some clients call and once we step them through the numbers, they sober up," he said. "The valuation is 100 times earnings in a stock market that is trading at 12."

"At the end of the day, if you have a small amount of money that you are in a position to lose a chunk of it and you want to speculate on Facebook, go ahead," he added. "But don't use money that you really need to save to do it. I would put it in Microsoft, which is dirt cheap right now."

To be sure, most technology analysts would argue that Facebook's growth potential far exceeds that of Microsoft Corp, whose stock has largely traded between $20 and $30 in the past decade. It is taking its first steps toward content streaming for instance, and has yet to make a serious overseas thrust.

And a $100 billion valuation for Facebook at the top end - while huge in absolute terms - is not that out of whack in Silicon Valley IPO tradition. Facebook is seeking a multiple of up to 27 times annual revenue, or up to 100 times earnings.

Apple Inc - today, the world's most valuable technology corporation - went public at a valuation of just $1.19 billion in 1980, equivalent to 25 times revenue and 102 times earnings. Google - to which Facebook is most often measured against in terms of potential - was valued at $23 billion at the time of its 2004 debut, or 218 times earnings.

But the sheer size of Facebook's valuation means that it will have to become the world's first $700 billion company if it is to replicate the gain in Google's stock.

"At these valuations, investors really need to set aside emotion...and invest with their heads," said Edward Reinhart, managing partner at Capital Advisors Wealth Management, who owns Facebook shares bought on private markets two years ago.

Reinhart, who advises clients on retirement planning, warned that hype building up ahead of Facebook's IPO could mean "dangerous waters for the retail investor."

INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS STOCK UP

Facebook, led by 27-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, on Wednesday filed its IPO prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission, seeking to raise $5 billion.

The anticipation surrounding the company and its growth potential recalls the hoopla that accompanied Apple's, Google's, and Amazon.com Inc's stock debuts. All three companies have done the near-impossible -- lived up to the hype.

There are many who believe Facebook will do the same, pointing to its 843 million users and the fact that the company is much bigger and more profitable than other recent Internet debuts, such as the loss-making Pandora Media Inc or Groupon Inc.

Social game company Zynga closed up nearly 17 percent on Thursday in the first trading session after Facebook revealed it made 12 percent of its revenue last year from the video game publisher.

"Facebook has the most potential," said Greenwich, Connecticut-based investment manager Jeff Matthews, speaking about its business plan rather than its stock price. "It's the next Google."

While retail investors are still combing through the numbers and doing the math, institutional investors have quietly bought Facebook shares via private pre-IPO exchanges like SharesPost and SecondMarket.

About 50 equity funds of the 3,842 tracked by Morningstar disclosed holdings of Facebook stock, led by Morgan Stanley's institutional Opportunity H fund with 3.5 percent of its $242 million portfolio devoted to the social network.

Other funds that have disclosed holdings included those managed by Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, ING, Principal and MassMutual.

EMOTIONAL CONNECTION

As with Apple and Google, consumers feel strong emotional connections to Facebook, which could make its stock vulnerable to wild swings if it attracts many retail investors.

When the SEC released Facebook's IPO prospectus on Wednesday evening, its website slowed to a crawl as traffic increased 100 times. Facebook also made it into betting books - Irish bookmaker Paddy Power is taking bets on what the share price will be when the social network begins trading.

The odds are 7 to 2 so far that investors will be paying between $25 and $34.99 for a share, according to the bookmaker.

"The challenge is trying to keep individual investor enthusiasm in some sort of line with economic reality," said Lise Buyer, an IPO adviser who worked at Google at the time of its IPO, but hasn't worked on the Facebook IPO.

Facebook "has very strong prospects, but all companies have stock prices that at some point must correlate to fundamentals."

The social network's 2011 revenue rose 88 percent to $3.71 billion while net profit increased 65 percent to $1 billion in last year. Those are not stellar numbers when compared with Apple's 65 percent growth in revenue to $108.24 billion in fiscal 2011. Apple also outpaced Facebook in terms of income growth, with profit increasing 85 percent to $25.92 billion.

Despite this, Apple - with nearly $100 billion in cash and securities - trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 13 times, far lower than the 100 times historic P/E of Facebook's IPO, assuming the $100 billion valuation.

Even Microsoft -- which saw net income grow 23 percent to $23.1 billion and revenue rise 12 percent to 69.9 billion for fiscal 2011 -- trades at 11 times future earnings.

That's why Schermerhorn, whose firm already owns Apple shares, said he preferred to invest in Microsoft over Facebook. Amazon's shares trade at a relatively dear forward P/E of 131, while Google trades at 19.5.

"I know it is dominant in its space. Granted, the space is not growing as quickly as Facebook, but I am getting a nice dividend to wait," he said of Microsoft. "I don't have that with Facebook."

(Reporting By Sarah McBride and Poornima Gupta, editing by Tiffany Wu, Ed Lane and Carol Bishopric)

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Facebook surrenders its privacy in IPO documents

The unveiling came late Wednesday when the company that depends on people to share their lives online filed its plans to raise $5 billion in an initial public offering of stock. It's a revelatory moment that prospective investors, curious competitors and nosy reporters have been awaiting for two years. During that time, Facebook established itself as a communications hub and emerged as a threat to the Internet's most powerful company, Google Inc.

This Dec. 13, 2011 file photo, shows of worker inside Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Facebook, the social network that changed "friend" from a noun to a verb, is expected to file as early as Wednesday to sell stock on the open market. Its debut is likely to be the most talked-about initial public offering since Google in 2004. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, file)

As with almost anything crafted by a bunch of lawyers and bankers, the 197-page prospectus that Facebook filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission is filled with boilerplate legalese and mind-numbing numbers.

But there were some juicy details in there, too.

Above all, the documents confirmed what everyone had been hearing: Facebook is very profitable and getting stronger. The company Mark Zuckerberg started with some friends in 2004 has seen its annual revenue soar from $777 million in 2009 to $3.7 billion last year. Facebook's earnings have grown at a similar rate too, ballooning from $122 million in 2009 to $668 million last year.

Facebook ended 2011 with $3.9 billion in cash. That's a relatively small amount compared to the nearly $45 billion that Google has in the bank.

Facebook's prosperity has been fueled by a steady expansion of its audience, making its website a more attractive marketing vehicle for ads, which account for most of the company's revenue. Facebook ended last year with 845 million users, up 39 percent from 608 million at the end of 2010. Those users share their interests and preferences prodigiously. Facebook recorded a daily average of 2.7 billion "likes" and comments during the final three months of last year.

Facebook has become so addictive that more than half its audience — 483 million users — log in every day.

Facebook's revenue total disappointed some people who pored through the documents. One reason: The company generates about $4.39 in revenue per user. "That is a surprisingly low number," said University of Notre Dame finance professor Tim Loughran, who studies IPOs. Google's annual revenue of nearly $38 billion works out to more than $30 per user of its services.

"Facebook needs to find more ways to get revenue from their users," Loughran said.

Facebook listed its most promising expansion opportunities as Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, Russia and South Korea. The company, based in Menlo Park, Calif., eventually hopes to make its service available in China if it can navigate rules requiring online content to be censored if the Chinese government considers it to be objectionable or obscene.

The IPO filing gives some clue when Facebook is likely to surpass 1 billion users. If it can add users at roughly the same pace as last year, Facebook should surpass the 1 billion mark this summer.

As it is, Facebook already generates 44 percent of its revenue outside the U.S. The company is also developing other sources of revenue beyond online advertising faster than Google. Advertising accounted for 85 percent of Facebook's revenue last year. It made up 96 percent of Google's. Facebook's other revenue sources include the 30 percent cut of sales it takes from game makers and other external applications companies that sell things on its website.

The big question is whether Facebook's numbers are impressive enough to fetch the lofty IPO price. It's still too early in the process for Facebook to reveal how much it intends to ask for its shares, but Wednesday's filing provides some clues. Facebook valued its Class B common stock at $29.73 at the end of December, down slightly from appraisals of $30.07 in June and September. If this unfolds like most hot IPOs, Facebook will probably try to sell its shares at a premium. That could mean an IPO price in the $35 to $40 range. Investor demand, though, ultimately will dictate the pricing.

Facebook still hasn't listed how many outstanding shares it has, but the documents make it possible to make a rough estimate of the company's market value at the end of last year. Financial notes in the filing show Facebook calculated it had about 2.9 billion fully diluted shares at the end of December. That works out to a market value of about $86 billion, based on Facebook's $29.73-per-share self-appraisal.

At that price, the nearly 534 million shares that the 27-year-old Zuckerberg owns are worth about $16 billion. The filing indicates Zuckerberg will sell an unspecified number of shares in the IPO to cover a tax bill for exercising a stock option to buy 120 million shares. Zuckerberg has been collecting a $500,000 salary but that will fall to one dollar next year at his own request, according to the filing.

Other big winners in the IPO include: Facebook co-founder and old Zuckerberg friend, Dustin Moskovitz, who owns nearly 134 million shares; venture capital firm Accel Partners, which owns 201 million shares; Russian investor DST Global Ltd., which owns 131 million shares; and former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel, who owns nearly 45 million shares.

Hundreds of other Facebook employees could become millionaires because they receive stock as part of their compensation. Facebook has about 3,200 employees now, nearly 2,000 more than it did two years ago.

Facebook also shared some of its biggest worries in the filing. Among other things, it cited Google's ability to use its dominance in Internet search to promote its Google Plus social network. Facebook also frets the possibility that regulators in Europe and the U.S. may impose tougher privacy rules that would make it more difficult for the company to stockpile information about its users.

Source: The Associated Press

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Anonymous takes down DOJ website in response to Megaupload case

It appears that the widespread hacking group Anonymous has taken umbrage to the takedown of Megaupload by the Department of Justice today. So much so that it appears to be taking down the DOJ site in retaliation.

Jason Safoutin@dragonfire1024

BREAKING: In response to seizure of#Megaupload #Anonymous takes down #USJustice Department website justice.gov

20 Jan 12

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The official Anonymous Twitter account hasn’t accepted responsibility for the act as of yet, but the group is clearly not happy about what has gone down with the Megaupload takedown and indictments:

Anonymous@AnonyOps

Feds shut down megaupload.comti.me/A15C5R #censorship ....sigh. This bullshit never ends.

20 Jan 12

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On the other hand, the Anonymous Sweden Twitter account has admitted responsibility for the attack on the DOJ site:

Anonymous Sweden@AnonOpsSweden

#OpPayBack Target: DOWN justice.gov - 15 minutes after feds announce arrest of Megaupload 7, #Anonymous strikes #svpol

20 Jan 12

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The Department of Justice site http://www.justice.gov has been slow since the announcement about Megaupload became public, but it has been up and down ever since, pointing to a potential DDoS attack of some sort.

By following the Twitter hashtag #OpPayBack, you can watch the chatter about the Anonymous attack on both the DOJ site and Univeral Music’s site, calling the operation a “success”.

The website attacks stem from the FBI indictments of seven people associated with Megaupload, which is being accused of numerous counts of copyright infringement. So far, four people have been arrested, including its founder Kim Dotcom.

UPDATE: One of the official Anonymous accounts on Twitter has indeed accepted responsibility for the attack on both the DOJ and Universal Music websites:

AnonOps@anonops

Tango down! universalmusic.com &justice.gov// #Megaupload

20 Jan 12

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UPDATE 2: Anonymous has also taken responsibility for taking down the MPAA and RIAA sites as well:

AnonOps@anonops

REMEMBER REMEMBER We are#Anonymous We are too many for them!#Megaupload JUSTICE.GOV RIAA MPAA UNIVERAL MUSIC ALL DOWN!

20 Jan 12

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SOUrce: The Next Web

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