Christian Taylor, CEO of leading Facebook ecommerce platform, Payvment, tells WebProNews he’s not worried about the company’s future.

Francis Gaskins, the President of IPODesktop, spoke with WebProNews earlier this year, and told us he was skeptical of the future growth of Facebook given its past quarter earnings.

“[If] you look at what happened for December 2010, March, June, and September of 2011, oddly enough, what you will find is the operating earnings were flat,” said Gaskins. “The net after tax earnings were flat, and the margins – the profit margins – went down.”

“The credibility of management’s forecast is very, very important,” he added.

More recently, we talked with Vitaliy Katsenelson, the Chief Investment Officer at Investment Management Associates and author of The Little Book of Sideways Markets. He too voiced doubt about investing in Facebook and indicated that Wall Street would quickly demand higher revenues and a CEO that is more committed to profitability.

“After a while, investors are going to start looking at it… not as this kind of prized asset, but as a business where genuine cash flow is essential,” he said.

“I want him [Zuckerberg] to think about long term stability,” he continued, “and if he doesn’t, I would just run. I would not touch the stock.”

What’s more, a new poll from Whisper Number does not deliver results in Facebook’s favor either. The financial research firm surveyed 1,100 investors and traders and found that 68 percent of them would not consider Facebook a “buy” after its IPO. When asked if Facebook was a long term investment, 65 percent of those surveyed also answered with “No.”

Contrary to these viewpoints, there are those who value Facebook very highly. Payvment’s Taylor told WebProNews that he was not at all worried about the company going public or its future, and that the wildly popular social network is much more than Facebook.com. Unlike other destination sites, he told us that Facebook creates a means to connect the entire Internet and world. Specifically, it brings people together while also allowing them to discover news, movies, games, and much more.

“[It’s] something that’s so engrained into the fabric of the entire Internet,” he said. “If you look at Facebook as just a .com entity like you would any other .com place, it’s very narrow-sighted.”

Taylor is also very confident in Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. As a fellow CEO/engineer, he told us that he watches Zuckerberg’s leadership “in awe.”

“The reason why Facebook can still innovate to this day, and the reason why whenever I talk to an employee of Facebook, they’re excited to be working there – they truly do feel like they’re changing the world… that is Mark Zuckerberg’s doing,” pointed out Taylor.

“He’s really the guy that rallies that company and will going forward,” he added.

Taylor believes so strongly in Facebook and its CEO that he built his own company on top of the social network. Payvment, as he explained, allows businesses to add ecommerce to Facebook in order to create a new social shopping experience. At this point, it has more than 160,000 businesses using its apps to promote their products and services on Facebook and is adding hundreds more daily.

“We’re really truly inventing a completely different kind of shopping when it comes to shopping on a social network such as Facebook,” he said.

It is this new shopping experience and the “huge possibilities” that it brings that makes Facebook a good investment to Taylor. He’s not concerned about competition from Amazon or eBay since Facebook enables serendipitous shopping. In other words, users shop based on what is happening in the Facebook environment. For instance, around the season premiere of the hit show the “Walking Dead,” Payvment noticed that zombie related items were their top sellers.

Taylor believes that Facebook will build upon its ecommerce platform and utilize it for further monetization. He envisions the current gaming “credits” being integrated into ecommerce in a way that makes shopping universal and seamless through the Facebook platform. With Facebook’s IPO, Taylor told us that he could see this potential concept and other innovations happening very quickly.

“A lot of times… when companies go IPO and they get big,” he said, “they have a tendency to slow down. But, I have a feeling that… we’re gonna see the complete opposite.”

Facebook better not slow down, because it has a lot more competitors than those mentioned. The giant elephant in the competition room, of course, is Google, who also happens to have a pretty wide presence throughout the web (beyond Google.com).

It’s not just a matter of Google+ vs. Facebook. Facebook is clearly lightyears ahead on that front. Advertising is another matter, however. Take a look at this infographic comparing Google and Facebook in terms of advertising and revenue:

There has been a fair amount of controversy this week around Facebook ads, with GM deciding to pull the $10 million it spends on them, in favor of trying the free content-centric Facebook Page/Timeline approach. As unfortunate as it is for the social network, the fact is that this approach is certainly going to continue to be an attractive strategy for many businesses. Of course, it’s always a matter of News Feed visibility, which is controlled by Facebook and its algorithm.

Some, as Taylor suggested, think Facebook Credits might become a bigger source of revenue for the company.

In Facebook’s defense though, there aren’t many companies that can claim to have a significant user base of addicts. A recent study found that Facebook is slowly becoming the reason to pay the Internet bill, at least in the U.S.

You don’t hear about “Google addicts” so much, although Google’s YouTube is certainly an Internet hotspot. The search giant is also trying to ramp up interaction on Google+ in hopes of turning it into the next big social hub.

On the other hand, a recent poll found that half the U.S. thinks Facebook is a passing trend. And why not? We’ve all seen other hugely popular social sites emerge and fizzle out. But again, Facebook is much more integrated with the web at large than any of those ever were.

And, of course, Facebook is huge around the entire world.

Chris Crum contributed to this report.

A group of Democrats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate have introduced similar legislation, and it’s flying under the name “Password Protection Act of 2012.” What it hopes to do is to “enhance current law to assure that compelling of coercing employees into providing access to their own private systems and data…is prohibited.”

Have you ever been asked by an employer (or future employer) to hand over your social media passwords? Did you do it? Or did you feel like it crossed the line? Let us know in the comments.

In the Senate, the legislation was introduced by Richard Blumenthal (D-CT). Soon after multiple outlets ran stories on this “rising trend” within some Human Resource departments, Blumenthal was one of the first U.S. legislators to speak out against the practice. Back in March, he said that he was “deeply troubled by the practices that seem to be spreading voraciously around the country,” and went on to call the password demands an “unreasonable invasion of privacy.” With those remarks, he also informed us that he was in the process of drafting a bill that would be ready soon.

A few days later, Blumenthal teamed up with Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to deliver a request to the Department of Justice. They asked that both the DOJ and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission “launch a federal investigation into a disturbing new trend.” Schumer has not left this cause either, as he is a co-sponsor of the new Password Protection Act.

Just days after that letter hit the Attorney General, a motion called “Mind Your Own Business on Passwords” failed in Congress. It would have made the employee password issue one monitored by the Federal Communication Commission. They would have had the right to declare the practice illegal.

So now these members of Congress are back with their own bills. Blumenthal’s Senate bill reads like this in the “prohibited activity” section:

acting as an employer, knowingly and intentionally -
(A) for the purposes of employing, promoting, or terminating employment, compels or coerces any person to authorize access, such as by providing a password or similar information through which a computer may be accessed, to a protected computer that is not the employer’s protected computer, and thereby obtains information from such protected computer; or
(B) discharges, disciplines, discriminates against in any manner, or threatens to take any such action against, any person – (i) for failing to authorize access described in subparagraph (A) to a protected computer that is not the employer’s protected computer; or
(ii) who has filed any complaint or instituted or caused to be instituted any proceeding under or related to this paragraph, or has testified or is about to testify in any such proceeding;

Along with Blumenthal and Schumer, Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) also sponsored the bill.

In the House, the companion legislation is being introduced by Martin Heinrich (D-NM) and Ed Perlmutter (D-CO). The crux of that bill is the same. Here’s some summary points from the House version of the Password Protection Act of 2012:

• No Compelled or Coerced Disclosure. The Password Protection Act prohibits an employer from forcing prospective or current employees to provide access to their own private systems as a condition of employment. Examples of prohibited actions include forcing employees to—

1. Hand over their private passwords to personal Facebook or Gmail accounts.
2. Log into a password-protected account so that the employer may browse the account’s contents.

• No Retaliation.  The Password Protection Act prohibits employers from discriminating or retaliating against a prospective or current employee because of a refusal to provide access to a password-protected account.
• Narrow Remedy. The Password Protection Act only prohibits adverse employment-related actions as a consequence of an employee’s failure to provide access to their own private accounts. It preserves the rights of employers to—

1. Permit social networking within the office on a voluntary basis.
2. Set their own policies for employer-operated computer systems and accounts.
3. Hold employees accountable for stealing data from their employers.

• Enforcement. Employers that violate the Password Protection Act may face financial penalties only.

“Employers should have no more right to online passwords than they would to a person’s lending history at the library or a diary in their home,” said Senator Shaheen. “As Facebook and other websites become an increasingly important part of the daily lives of millions of people, we must be vigilant in protecting online privacy. This legislation provides an important safeguard for all Americans.”

“People have an expectation of privacy when using social media like Facebook and Twitter,” said Representative Perlmutter. “They have an expectation that their right to free speech and religion will be respected when they use social media outlets. No American should have to provide their confidential personal passwords as a condition of employment. Both users of social media and those who correspond share the expectation of privacy in their personal communications. Employers essentially can act as impostors and assume the identity of an employee and continually access, monitor and even manipulate an employee ‘s personal social activities and opinions. That’s simply a step too far.”

The ACLU praises the bill for its wider scope. By focusing on computer access (as opposed to simply access to one social network like Facebook), the bill is “flexible” and is able to “evolve to cover any new service.”

But the praise is not absolute. The ACLU laments that the Password Protection Act doesn’t provide the same type of protection for students – a group that was originally wrapped up in employer-password-gate. They say that the recently-introduced SNOPA privacy bill (that also tackles the Facebook password request issue) does a better job to protect students. The ACLU is also less-than-thrilled with some of the exceptions:

The legislation also includes unnecessary exceptions. One exception allows states to exempt government employees or employees who work with children under age 13. Another allows the executive branch to exempt whole classes of workers if they come into contact with classified information, including soldiers. These sections authorize sweeping and unnecessary fishing expeditions. There are already a broad range of tools for investigating misconduct. Further, internet activities constantly create many new types of records, and these can already be used against employees in investigations. Just because you work for the government or with children, you shouldn’t forfeit the right to a private life online.

It’s obvious why an employer would want access to a prospective employee’s social media account. That’s where all the good stuff resides. If you want to make sure you’re not hiring a certain type of person – someone who disses their former employer publicly or someone who could embarrass the company with certain lifestyle choices – Facebook might be a great way to screen candidates. But there’s a line and we have to draw it. Not only is it a gargantuan invasion of privacy to be forced into giving up access to private data, but it could end up harming employers in the long run. I’m sure employers don’t want to find themselves in a situation where they are being sued for discrimination, based on something they found via a Facebook search.

While the Password Protection Act isn’t perfect, it’s on the right track. State legislatures are also moving on the issue, as the California State Assembly just unanimously approved a similar bill. Now, along with SNOPA, we have two new bills attempting to protect employees’ rights on the national level.

Do you think that there should be a national ban on this practice? Should Congress step in and outlaw it outright? Let us know in the comments.

There are a few reasons for why this sounds plausible and one or two for why it doesn’t. The most obvious reason that lends any validity to this rumor is the fact that Facebook’s money has been burning a hole in its pocket lately. In a little over a month, Facebook has acquired or absorbed Lightbox, Karma, Bolt Peters, and, perhaps most notable, Instagram. The company just ballooned its coffers after the company’s initial public offering one week ago and, in spite of seemingly everyone except Facebook being very upset with the its shares’ performance so far, Facebook does have some more money to burn.

More, Facebook has been upfront about the fact that it’s losing revenue traction due to more users accessing the site via mobile app than through the actual webpage. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, heading into the company’s IPO, tried to assuage investors’ concerns about Facebook’s mobile problem by telling them that the mobile frontier is the company’s top priority. If Facebook were to pick up Opera, the acquisition would add a very established mobile browser to the company’s inventory of mobile tools. Also, assuming that time is of the essence in turning Facebook’s mobile platform into a source of revenue growth, purchasing a respected browser like Opera would curtail any time lost spent on building a Facebook browser from scratch.

Beyond adding a slick, respected browser into its quiver, an acquisition of Opera would give Facebook a really nice browser-based email client, too.

It’s been all but officially verified by Facebook that it is developing its own search engine, too. Analysts have already speculated that a Facebook search engine would take a huge bite out of Google’s dominance of internet search. Combine a Facebook search engine and a Facebook browser and a Facebook email client and, well, you’ve got yourself some pretty plump Facebook fruit to attract advertisers.

Plus, if Facebook really wants to take a legitimate run at toppling Google, this would be a pretty firm push in that direction.

However, Facebook’s passed on big-time purchases before. Microsoft reportedly tried to sell its search engine, Bing, to Facebook last year. Zuckerberg declined the offer, though, saying that Facebook had too much on its plate at the time.

Facebook’s plate has hardly gotten any less crowded since then; really, the company’s added a second and third helping onto the plate without even clearing off what was there in the first place. Between the IPO mess and the impending class action lawsuits happening as a result of it, an FTC probe into the company’s acquisition of Instagram, and trying to find a way to earn back investors’ trust, Facebook’s got its big, blue hands full.

In the end, it’s a matter of what Facebook wants to prioritize: cleaning up its act with its nascent yet lackluster existence as a publicly traded company, or trying to keep moving forward with its agenda as a technology company. Then again, the company could take the Double Dare challenge and go after both goals at once. Not impossible, but it could lead to some haphazard decisions.

For what it’s worth, Thomas Ford, Opera System’s senior communications manager, says Opera Systems is mum on the subject of a Facebook acquisition. He told WebProNews, “We do not respond to market rumors and we have no comment to the rumor addressed in the question.”

Sandberg made no mention of Facebook’s financial woe directly, but she didn’t skirt the subject altogether. In a classic example of how to win with tongue-in-cheek humor, Sandberg began, “As you and your classmates spread out across the globe and walk across the stage tomorrow, I wish for you four things. First, that you keep in touch via Facebook. This is critical to your future success.”

She followed up the joke with another rib-tickler: “And we’re public now so can you click on an ad or two while you’re there?”

The audience laughed along with Sandberg’s wry humor, and it was good. Check out the video from CNN below to hear her masterful delivery.

We noticed this ourselves at first, but then when searching the Twitterverse, saw others complaining about it as well.

Here are a few of those complaints. Let us know if you’ve been experiencing problems yourself.

I wonder how much web traffic this is costing everybody. Facebook can be a tremendous source of not only traffic for sites, but engagement with user around a site’s content. If Facebook doesn’t get this problem fixed soon, there will no doubt be plenty of irate businesses.

Regular status updates do appear to be working, as do links from personal profiles.

We’ve reached out to Facebook, and will update if we receive a comment.

The polished up debut of Promoted Posts appears to build upon something Facebook tested out as far back as March 2010. Essentially, the purpose of paying to promote your update is to reach a larger audience. Upon clicking the “Promote” button, you’ll be presented with a menu of pricing options. The prices to promote a post are staggered based on how much of a reach you want for your post. If you’re aiming for the fences, for example, you can pay $20 to reach about a wide audience of Facebookers who have liked your Page. Alternately, if you want to aim more conservatively, you can select a less expensive value, such as $5, the cheapest (that I’ve seen), to only reach about a more concentrated selection your total fanbase.

WebProNews’ Facebook page hasn’t yet been granted the Promote function just yet, but the example below was captured by MarketingLand, who apparently have the feature now.

They’ve got a few other examples of what the new feature looks like on their post about it, if you’re so inclined to investigate the visual evidence further.

More, Facebook appears to be testing out different pricing structures. Another example spotted over at Business Insider lists the dollar increments as $15, $20, $30, $50, and $75. If I had to guess at this point, I’d say that the different pricing structures – notice BI’s gets a lot more expensive than MarketingLand’s – the different pricing scales are relative to the amount of Facebook fans your Page has. However, if that is the case, it almost seems like Facebook would then be penalizing Pages that have a ton of fans if it’s going to cost those administrators more money to promote a post than it would if they had, say, a fourth of the fans. Guess we’ll wait and see once this feature is fully available.

This Promoted Post feature doesn’t sound all too dissimilar to something Facebook was testing in New Zealand recently by giving the average Facebook user – not to be confused with the Page users that are for brands, companies, celebrities, etc. – an option to promote their posts. The pay option to promote your post to all of your friends ran about a $1.50 but there weren’t any reports that there were multiple pricing tiers.

Finally, there’ve been some reports throughout the day today that businesses have been having trouble posting updates to their Facebook Pages, so there could be a possible connection to Facebook’s decision to start rolling out the Promoted Posts option to pages and this temporary impairment of Page administrators’ ability to post links. As of writing this, we’re still not able to post links through our WPN page.

Anybody else out there getting their hands on the Promoted Post feature early? Let us know what you think, if you’d ever use it, why you’d use it, all that good stuff in the comments below.

According to Reuters, the House of Representatives and the Senate both have committees that will be looking into the problems and losses attached to Facebook’s IPO. Add this to class action lawsuits and the personal lawsuits – one wonder if all of that will eventually amass into one big lawsuit-ing conglomerate – and Facebook really has covered all of the bases with this snafu.

Sean Oblack, a spokesman to the Senate Banking Committee, said the review will focus on “issues raised in the news” and that staff will be conducting briefings with “Facebook, regulators and other stakeholders.”

Marisol Garibay, a spokeswoman for the House Financial Services Committee, said staff there is also receiving briefings on the issue and “gathering information and facts.”

“While no hearings specifically focused on this IPO are planned at this time, the Committee will have hearings over the coming weeks where this topic is likely to be raised,” she said in a statement.

Some of the points of interest that Congress may be looking at are the peculiar “glitch” NASDAQ experienced the morning of Facebook’s IPO that delayed the trading of Facebook shares and what role Morgan Stanley played in deceiving investors about Facebook’s earnings.

It’s seriously been nothing but bad news for Facebook since its IPO. Honestly, it’s hard to recall when this was actually still considered a good idea.

The new notification bar sits at the bottom of the home screen of the app, and alerts a user when a new check-in comment is made by a friend. It also notifies when a new compliment or friend request comes through. Yelp points out that the new toolbar makes it easier to manage social alerts, whether they be new friendships or quick comments.

Yelp held its IPO earlier in the month, placing shares at $22 a pop. The platform has been making improvements since, likely in part to calm nervous investors, much like Facebook, who has been trying to amp up its advertising segment since its own rocky IPO.

Instagram wasn’t enough for Facebook, however, as they have also created their own dedicated camera app for iOS. Despite being owned by Facebook, Instagram had to do something to compete. They turned to the only avenue there was – stand-alone camera hardware.

The above scenario is all true except for Instagram launching a stand-alone camera. What if we lived in a world where they did though? The super talented guys over at ElectRoulette, who brought us the genius Google Glasses parody Meme Glasses, has brought us an in depth look at the Instagram camera.

Resembling that old Kodak that’s gathering dust in the attic, the Instagram camera merges retro design with new technology like sepia filters. The camera can apply various filters and even add in new elements like mountains and flowers with the nature filter. The technology on display can also make your car appear more retro than it has any right being.

It’s pretty much accepted that the stand-alone camera market is really only for aficionados anymore. The general user now has a smartphone that can replace the camera and a wide variety of other functions. What if Instagram were to release a camera though? Would the same people who have flocked to the app buy a camera branded with their favorite camera app? The world may never know.

It’s easy to see Microsoft and Sony creating fan pages for their consoles, but Nintendo’s brand page is a little odd. The company just doesn’t seem the type to take advantage of newer marketing tactics like Facebook brand pages, favoring to use tried and true advertising campaigns. The company registered the brand page back in 2011, but it has seen little to no use until today.

The design is also a teaser in and of itself. The brand page has taken full advantage of the Timeline layout including a cover photo teaser. The teaser is of particular interest as it’s a barely open safe with the blue light of the Wii U’s self-loading emanating from the crack in the door.

All of this points to a bold, new Nintendo that is taking its social media marketing very seriously. In the past, Nintendo was always the company that was too traditional. Fans left the platform because they felt Nintendo wasn’t keeping up with the times. In a way, utilizing Facebook may be a response to those critics.

The page also hints at a Nintendo that may be taking social media beyond mere marketing. Nintendo always argued against online play and other similar features because it took away that feeling of being around your friends in the same room. This change to being more social media minded makes it seem like Nintendo now realizes that social media is the new way of interacting with your friends.

So are we going to see more social media integration in the Wii U? We won’t know until Nintendo’s E3 press conference on June 4, but I think there’s a good chance that Nintendo will announce some kind of Facebook or Twitter integration into its new console. Social media is the future and Nintendo has finally recognized its power.

As an aside, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime uploaded a video welcoming fans to the new frontier of social media. Be on the lookout for the awesome The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess statue in the background. Ah, the perks of being president of NoA.