Facebook shares fell more than 13 percent, falling below its $38 price of itsinitial public offering, in the social network’s second day of trading as a public company.

Meanwhile, the NASDAQ exchange continued to defend itself regarding the IPO’s delay on Friday.

The company’s shares [FB  34.03    -4.2018  (-10.99%)   ] last traded down more than 13 percent. The stock had previously closed 0.6 percent higher on Friday.

Investors and technology industry watchers are closely tracking the Menlo Park, Calif., company’s shares. The world’s largest social network was one of the most anticipated initial public stock offerings ever, and now serves as a bellwether for other social media companies.

Facebook’s market debut Friday suffered some hiccups, with trading on the Nasdaq delayed for a half hour and issues with traders’ orders. The stock closed Friday just 23 cents above where it priced Thursday night, when many investors had hoped for a big first-day pop.

Facebook shares fell below the offer price Monday before the market’s open. It was unclear at that time whether underwriters such as Morgan Stanley [MS 13.25    -0.10  (-0.75%)   ] would step in to help stabilize the stock.

Facebook Inc. (FB) is set to start trading today after a record initial public offering that made the social network more costly than almost every company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. (SPX)

Facebook sold 421.2 million shares at $38 each to raise $16 billion, a statement yesterday shows. That values the Menlo Park, California-based company at $104.2 billion, or 107 times trailing 12-month earnings, more than every S&P 500 member except Amazon.com Inc. and Equity Residential.

CONTINUED at Bloomberg.

Refuses to buy stock over privacy concerns.

In an interview with CNN, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian said he would refuse to buy Facebook stock because of the company’s appalling attitude to privacy and its support for the CISPA bill.

“I’m not planning on it…I understand the business value to what Facebook is doing. We’ve never seen a company like this before–ever. And it knows things about our private lives that no one else does. And one of the big issues that a lot of us in the tech community have had of late has been their support for bills like CISPA that make it really easy for companies like Facebook to hand over private data about us without any due process. So that’s why I’ll be holding off,” said Ohanian.

Reddit joins Mozilla as the only other major tech company to decry CISPA, with firms like Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Symantec, AT&T and Verizon all backing the bill. Last week, Mozilla released a statement calling the legislation an “alarming” threat to privacy, adding, “The bill infringes on our privacy, includes vague definitions of cybersecurity, and grants immunities to companies and government that are too broad around information misuse.”

CISPA has been identified by many as a greater threat to privacy than SOPA, which was opposed by a deluge of major tech firms after a viral online opposition campaign, but because CISPA has received less attention, corporate giants have found it easier to stay mute.

Not only would CISPA mandate ISPs to share Internet data of users with government “notwithstanding any other provision of law,” it also empowers the Department of Homeland Securityto monitor the communications of the federal courts and Congress, and intercept tax returns sent to the IRS.

The bill “gives companies a free pass to monitor and collect communications and share that data with the government and other companies, so long as they do so for ‘cybersecurity purposes,’” the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has noted. “Just invoking ‘cybersecurity threats’ is enough to grant companies immunity from nearly all civil and criminal liability, effectively creating an exemption from all existing law.”

CONTINUED at Prison Planet. Written by Paul Joseph Watson. Video at link.

Facebook’s IPO has set new records for wealth hyperbole.

It’s  the “best investment ever!” It’s the biggest liquidity event ever! It’s about to unleash a new wealth wave in America! It’s a boon to wealth managers and Palo Alto realtors. It’s going to solve California’s budget problems, help fix our education system and feed the poor in Africa.

But the most widely repeated superlative about the Facebook IPO is that it will create “1,000 overnight millionaires.”

This is impossible to know, of course. But the phrase “1,000 millionaires” appears to have magical – if not factual — significance in Silicon Valley.

Tech IPO watchers might recall Google’s IPO in 2004. Press reports at the time said the IPO “created more than 1,000 paper millionaires,” including a chef and a masseuse. That statistic was often attributed to “estimates,” though it was never clear where those estimates came from.

With Facebook, the “1,000 millionaire” claim first showed up in a Reuters article in December. Reuters partly attributes the number to a former in-house recruiter for Facebook who says “there will be thousands of millionaires.” The thousand claim has been picked up around the world and used as gospel in many recent reports about the IPO.

If the 1,000 number is true, then every one of the company’s 700 employees as of the end of 2008, as well as hundreds of other employees and investors, have shares worth at least $1 million or more.

Reuters concedes that there is no precise data on how many shares are owned by how many employees. It notes that most of the gains will go to the co-founders and the big venture-capital investors.  Reuters said that in 2009, an engineer with 15 years experience hired by Facebook could get options to buy 65,000 shares at $6 a share. After the 5-1 stock split in 2010, those shares would be worth $12 million at the expected valuation of $40 a share.

That was 2009, of course. And it was for a 15-year engineer. Press reports say Facebook has become far more stingy with stock in recent years. Managers hired last year were getting as little as 2,000 shares – giving them paper wealth of a measly $80,000.

What’s more, many of the paper millionaires won’t be able to do anything with that paper wealth until the middle of next year, when they can actually sell the stock. Until then, it’s just paper. And Facebook’s share price may or may not be worth $40 by the middle of 2013 (ask the Groupon guys).

Facebook will no doubt create a large amount of wealth for a single company. Employee-wise, it’s a small company. And its IPO is far from a “wave of wealth.” Even if it creates 3,000 new millionaires, those new millionaires would represent  less than 0.5% of the millionaires in California alone.

More like a splash than a “wave.”

How many millionaires do you think Facebook will create?

Source: Wall Street Journal.

Counting Twitter mentions would have you believe that Ron Paul is the most popular Republican candidate in the ongoing U.S. primaries. Umm, right.

But some social media analysis of politics is going beyond that. A partnership between Facebook and Politico announced today is one of the more far-reaching efforts. It will consist of sentiment analysis reports and voting-age user surveys, accompanied by stories by Politico reporters.

Most notably, the Facebook-Politico data set will includeFacebook users’ private status messages and comments. While that may alarm some people, Facebook and Politico say the entire process is automated and no Facebook employees read the posts.

Rather, every post and comment — both public and private — by a U.S. user that mentions a presidential candidate’s name will be fed through a sentiment analysis tool that spits out anonymized measures of the general U.S. Facebook population.

This is similar to the way Google offers reports on search trends based on its users’ aggregate search activities.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Summary: A U.S. District Court is to allow users’ of Facebook to sue the social network, after California state ‘publicity’ law was thought to have been infringed.

*Taken from the Telegraph.

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*Taken from Tech Crunch.

Facebook has their sights locked on mobile. We know that. This afternoon at GigaOm’s Mobilize conference, Facebook Mobile Chief Erick Tseng touched on just how crucial mobile is to them — and more importantly, how crucial it will be.

Just how crucial are we talking about? Within 1-2 years, Tseng sees Facebook becoming as much of a mobile company as it is a desktop/web company.

“It’s interesting that if you take a look at our top line of growth, we’re getting to the point that the countries we’re getting into now are ones that don’t really use computers at all. The predominant ways people are connecting in Africa, in India, is through their mobile devices. As Mark touched on a few days ago, we now have over 350 million mobile users. Within another year or two, we’ll be a mobile company, with 1/2 mobile users.”

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*Taken from Natural News.

The social media empire Facebook has unveiled some new “features” on its platform in recent days that many allege are a total and compete privacy-breaching nightmare. But one hidden feature, discovered by Nik Cubrilovic, an Australian entrepreneur and writer, that few people are aware of is the fact that Facebook now monitors your online activity, even when you are not logged in to the service.

With each new change Facebook makes, users’ privacy becomes a little less … nonexistent, if you will. The most recent “News Feed” modifications, for example, display everything you say and do on the site to all of your “friends,” and even to the public. And now, even after logging out of Facebook, permanent “cookies” track all your movements on websites that contain Facebook buttons or widgets.

“Even if you are logged out, Facebook still knows and can track every page you visit,” Cubrilovic wrote on a recent blog posting. “The only solution is to delete every Facebook cookie in your browser, or to use a separate browser for Facebook interactions” (http://nikcub-static.appspot.com/lo…).

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