The company responsible for Farmville, Mafia Wars, and several other popular social games is finding out that nothing's guaranteed in the second coming of the dot-com bubble. Zynga shares began trading today, and at first, it looked as though Zynga would follow in the footsteps of Groupon, LinkedIn, and other social sites that have gone public and exploded on the stock market.
The new Facebook is here a little later than expected, but still too soon for some. The Timeline profile is going live for all users. It aims to tell the story of a user’s life in a giant scrollable page. Users are encouraged to fill in relevant details that Facebook might not know. Go ahead, give them more data. Cunning.
For a few hours today, Facebook users were able to snoop around in other users’ private photos thanks to a flaw in the Facebook code. Interestingly, the issue was present in the abuse reporting tool. The flaw did not expose all a user’s photos, but several choice snapshots could be harvested with the hack. Facebook patched the exploit, but not until the Internets snatched some of Zuckerberg’s personal photos.
Some of the biggest technology firms in existence are reportedly squaring off against India’s telecommunications minister over the filtering of user-generated content. According to several individuals that have been present at meetings, Minister Kapit Sibal is demanding that the likes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo proactively screen user content for disparaging or defamatory statements. 
Facebook is determined to double up its workforce, and it plans to do that by hiring "thousands of employees" in the Big Apple. The world's largest social networking playground has already begun accepting applications as it prepares to open a new engineering center in New York City next year, the first of its kind in the East Coast. Facebook currently employs around 100 people at its New York facility, compared to around 3,000 employees in California.
Facebook has had its own version of a Foursquare style check in system for ages now, but given that just about everyone including myself still calls it a “Foursquare style check in system” suggests they’ve failed somehow. Given how many users the social networking giant hosts each month one would have suspected the in-house solution would have picked up critical mass by now, but somehow it seems to have stumbled. Now according to reports, Facebook has acquired Foursquare competitor 
Readers of Maximum PC know that our own Gordon Mah Ung hates social networking. But he loves to rant, as evidenced by our podcasts, and if he ever chose to embrace Facebook, he could spout off whatever injustices he feels like raging about, 60,000 characters at a time. Actually, Facebook bumped up the posting limit to 63,206, and we're sure Gordon would have no trouble ranting for an additional 3,000 characters.
There's no question Facebook will fetch a ton of cash if it's thrust upon the stock market, you can be as sure about that as anything else in this world. But can it fetch $10 billion? According to at least one report, that's how much Mark Zuckerberg and company hope to raise when Facebook goes public next year. If an initial public offering (IPO) brings in that kind of cash, it will ultimately value Facebook at more than $100 billion.
Where data is concerned, there are few companies that even come close to rivaling the size of Facebook’s data reserves, constantly replenished by a ceaseless stream of Likes and much more. But as they often say, with large amounts of data comes great responsibility. And that is where the European Commission (EC) seems to have a problem with the world’s largest social network.
Lawrence Hryb (aka Major Nelson), director of programming for Xbox Live at Microsoft, on Tuesday announced the release date of the next Xbox 360 update in a blog post. The update, which will bring a raft of features, will be available next month. Hit the jump to find out the exact release date and other details.
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