Facebook stock hit a new intra-day low of $19.69 Thursday morning, and ended the day 6.3% lower at $19.87.

About 22 million shares changed hands in the first 10 minutes of trading, and by the end of the session that volume soared to nearly 157 million shares. About 271 million shares are newly eligible for sale Thursday.

Like many initial public offerings, Facebook’s May 18 debut debut included a “lockup” agreement that requires some shareholders to hold on to their stock for a certain period — typically 90 to 180 days. Lockups are meant to prevent the market from being swamped with too many of a company’s shares immediately after an IPO. Keeping stocks scarce can help boost their value.

But when a company’s locked-up shares are set free, the stock typically tanks, since millions of new shares flood in at once. Facebook (FB) has already lost nearly half its value since its debut.

Facebook’s fellow newly public Internet companies felt the pain when their lockups ended. LinkedIn (LNKD) slumped as much as 7% on its lockup expiration day, and Groupon (GRPN) fell 10% to hit a new low.

Thursday is only the first in a series of lockup expirations for Facebook. Its unusual staggered system means several more expiration days are coming, and a total of 1.8 billion shares could hit the market in the next nine months.

The big Facebook stock dump could come in mid-November. That’s when Facebook will convert the special form of restricted stock units, or RSUs, held by most of its staff into actual shares of its stock.

Pop went the social media bubble. Now what?

Facebook’s employees will owe taxes this year on the value of that stock. Like most companies that issue RSUs, Facebook is handling the logistics on its employees’ behalf. The employees are still ultimately responsible for making sure their tax bills are fully covered.

Facebook plans to withhold a big chunk of its employees’ shares — roughly 120 million — and sell them on the open market to cover the tax bill. Selling off so many shares at once could hammer the company’s stock price. So Facebook has a Plan B: It can tap its credit lines and cash reserves to pay off the tax bill without issuing equity.

A Facebook representative declined to comment about which route the company plans to take, but the company has carefully lined up its options. It took out a $3 billion credit line specifically earmarked for the potential RSU-linked tax bill, and it’s currently sitting on $10 billion in cash.

At Facebook’s current share price, the tax bill would total around $2.6 billion. If its stock price keeps dropping, that bill will shrink further.

Facebook did get a vote of confidence from one investor last week. Netflix (NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings, who’s also a member of Facebook’s board, disclosed to regulators that he recently bought $1 million worth of shares in the social network. To top of page

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Source: CNN

Currently only in preview mode, the project is getting attention because of its founders’ impressive pedigree. Evan Williams and Biz Stone co-founded Twitter and Blogger, so they know about blogging, both long and short form. Medium is the latest product out of their Obvious Corporation, which incubated Twitter in its early days, and the duo has a grand vision for the blogging tool, elucidated in a long announcement post by Williams.

“We’re re-imagining publishing in an attempt to make an evolutionary leap, based on everything we’ve learned in the last 13 years and the needs of today’s world,” says Williams in the post.

For a project that is “rethinking” publishing, the first go is a blogging platform that recycles many of the best features already at work on other sites — Pinterest, Tumblr, Blogger, Reddit — and ties it heavily into Twitter.

The design is like a minimalist Tumblr or WordPress theme. Posts can be just a large photo, words or a combination. They are organized into collections, like Pinterest, and can be sorted by popularity based on votes from the community, like Reddit and Digg (there’s also an option to view by newest first).

Clicking on a person’s name doesn’t take you to a landing page that shows you all their posts. Rather, you’re whisked away to their Twitter profile, where you can scan for links to Medium posts they’ve created.

Perhaps following specific people isn’t the point of Medium; at its heart are the collections which allow you to explore content by topic. Current collections include the photo-based “When I Was a Kid,” a bunch of first-person stories titled “This Happened to Me” and “I.M.H.O.,” a selection of editorial pieces on everything from Groupon to socialism.

The goal of Medium doesn’t appear to be revolutionizing how content is shared, but to boost the quality of the content itself, according to its founders.

“Lots of services have successfully lowered the bar for sharing information, but there’s been less progress toward raising the quality of what’s produced,” says Williams.

Medium gives people space to go deeper than is allowed by Twitter’s 140-character limit, but there’s no pressure to post regularly or have a branded presence. Voting and collections put the emphasis on surfacing the best content from a mass of people, organizing them into subject-oriented pages like sections of a newspaper. Users can wax poetic about their hopes and dreams “without the burden of becoming a blogger or worrying about developing an audience,” says Williams.

Posting privileges are limited to a chosen few for the time being, but anyone can make an account, using their Twitter handle, to browse and vote on posts. The first incarnation of Medium seems familiar and a little mundane, but hopefully it’s just a starting point for this team of experienced blogging and content veterans.

“We’re just starting the journey of figuring out what all that means, and what we’re releasing today is just a sliver of what we’ve figured out,” said Williams.

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Source: CNN

But the most popular way today’s teens discover music is through clicking around on YouTube.

That’s the finding of a new study by media research firm Nielsen. Its Music 360 report set out to learn how music is found, purchased and consumed.

Among all adults, radio remains the most popular tool, with 48 percent saying that’s how they usually discover their new jams.

Young listeners opting to stream, not own music but more teens, 64 percent, cited YouTube, the Web’s leading video-sharing site, as a place where they listen to music. Followed by radio (56%), iTunes (53% ) and CDs (50%).

The popularity of YouTube is dramatically higher among teens than all adults. Only 7 percent of all respondents said they discover music most frequently through the site.

Strangely, the report doesn’t address teens’ listening habits on music-streaming sites such as Pandora, Spotify or Grooveshark.

“The accessibility of music has seen tremendous expansion and diversification,” said David Bakula, a Nielsen senior vice president. “While younger listeners opt for technologically advanced methods , traditional methods of discovery like radio and word-of-mouth continue to be strong drivers.”

The study also shows the changing landscape of music sales. Just over one in three teens (36 percent) said they’d bought a CD in the past year, while more than half (51 percent) said they’d paid to download at least one song.

The report came from an online survey of 3,000 people in the United States.

Among all respondents, finding new music still relies upon a mix of new media and more traditional means.

In addition to the 48 percent who favor radio, 10 percent said they rely on friends or relatives for suggestions. But more than half (54 percent) said those personal recommendations make them more likely to make a purchase.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, claims more than 800 million unique visitors every month. More than 3 billion hours of videos are viewed each month and 72 hours worth of video are uploaded every minute, according to the site.

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Source: CNN

Pinterest is a visual bookmarking tool for collecting and organizing content you find online by theme, such as women’s hats, cake recipes, cat photos or motorcycles. Users mark, or “pin,” sites they like and make carefully crafted collections that other people can view and share.

Since it launched last year, Pinterest has only been available on the Web and through its popular iPhone app. As the company rolled out new features and expanded into additional languages, it has heard one request back from users: Make an Android app.

On Tuesday, the company announced three new Pinterest apps, starting with its first Android offering. The engineers at Pinterest built the free Android app from the ground up and optimized it to work on the large range of available Android tablet and smartphone devices. No matter what size device you use, the app’s design is the familiar cascade of tiled images. The app is available in the Google Play store and is expected to be in the Android Appstore later this week for Kindle Fire owners.

The iPad also got its own Pinterest app, a speedy experience with some nice new user interface touches. Swiping to one side brings up the list of categories, the other direction flips through the layers of pins you’ve opened. There’s an embedded browser in the iPad version of the app. Double clicking on a product such as a pair of shoes will take you to the brand’s site within the Pinterest app, and you can then see what other product users have pinned from the same company.

“It’s a really different kind of browsing experience,” said Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp, who told the story of first seeing Steve Jobs demo the iPad while reclining in a chair. “It was really amazing because he was using that device exactly how we thought Pinterest would be used sometime in the future.”

The Pinterest iPhone app got a refresh, which Sharp said will increase stability and speed. It has an updated design that lets you view two columns of pins.

The company announced the mobile news at a gathering in its new San Francisco office space. The summer-themed event featured paper lanterns, finger sandwiches and stations inspired by popular Pinterest topics — a polaroid photo booth with mustache props, DIY postcards, temporary tattoos and a design-your-own terrarium table with the ultimate Pinterest staple, mason jars. The event was one bluegrass band short of being the ultimate hipster wedding.

An in-person announcement is a departure for Pinterest, which typically rolls out features slowly and announces them on its blog. However, the shift to mobile and the gathering of people tied into its newest theme: using Pinterest to do more in the real world.

“Our goal is to actually get you offline, to get you to go out,” said Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann, citing the large amount of do-it-yourself actionable content people pin on Pinterest.

The site’s growth has leveled off in recent months after its meteoritic rise from 1.03 million unique monthly users in the United States in August 2011 to 17.8 million in February. In July, Pinterest had 23.3 million unique users in the United States, according to research firm comScore.

That number is likely to jump again as Pinterest reaches for new audiences with its anyone-is-welcome phase and trio of mobile apps.

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Source: CNN

That’s the position Pandora has taken toward a new Facebook feature that lets users automatically publish information to their profiles about songs they listen to, videos they watch and articles they read.

Pandora, which makes the popular personalized Internet radio service, isn’t just concerned about clutter in your Facebook friends’ news feeds. Some listeners could feel violated when they learn that an application is broadcasting information about their activities, Pandora executives said.

“It’s true that music is a social experience, but it’s also a very private experience,” Pandora founder Tim Westergren said in a recent phone interview. “We have to be very cautious.”

Facebook is poised to release new features at a news conference on Wednesday that will allow users to automatically publish information from other websites and apps to their Timeline profiles, according to a person familiar with the project.

These will go beyond the Facebook Music app that’s already available, the person said. For example, a fitness program that tracks physical activities could send Facebook an update after a long jog. The plans were reported earlier by the website All Things Digital.

A Facebook spokesman declined to comment. At a news conference in September, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said people would benefit from publishing more data and letting computer algorithms sort out what’s important.

“No activity is too big or too small to share,” Zuckerberg said. “You don’t have to ‘Like’ a movie. You just watch a movie.”

Facebook will press on without the support of some major app makers, such as Apple, whose iTunes software is the No. 1 digital jukebox. An Apple spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokeswoman for Flipboard, an app that creates personalized magazines from social network feeds, has said the company doesn’t plan to send information to Facebook about every article users read and will instead let users selectively post with a share button. She said people probably wouldn’t want to broadcast everything.

Pandora has supported many of Facebook’s platform development efforts in the past. Pandora launched Facebook sharing features when they were first rolled out and was among the first to support Facebook’s Instant Personalization program, which automatically recognizes a Pandora visitor’s Facebook account.

“We have a great relationship with Facebook,” a Pandora spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail. “We continue to be excited about what they are doing and more generally about the social dimension of music — for example, there are a host of great new social features on the new Pandora.com site that we launched in September.”

Pandora’s feed can be tweaked or edited by each user, but only includes information when a user creates a new radio station or bookmarks or clicks the thumbs-up button on a particular song or artist. It doesn’t post a feed of every song that plays.

Facebook lets users manage which apps can publish to their profiles using a page called the Activity Log. In an interview with reporters in September, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said the company’s long-term goal is to have every app support the auto-publish features. Earlier partners have said that the tools have brought in hordes of newcomers to their websites.

Pandora is one of many that is reluctant to sign on, but its absence from Facebook Music is noticeable.

“There is a segment for sure that wants to really promiscuously share and wants to hear about everything that their friends are listening to,” Pandora CTO Tom Conrad told a small audience at a technology conference recently. However, they make up a minority, he said.

“There is a really large percentage of the Pandora audience that actually aren’t interested at all in what their friends are listening to,” Conrad said. “They don’t want to spam their entire social network with things they’re discovering.”

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Source: CNN

Google’s home search page has the logo: “Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the web!”

Smaller sites, such as Reddit.com and BoingBoing.net, were also dark, with BoingBoing noting that the proposed anti-piracy bills “would put us in legal jeopardy if we linked to a site anywhere online that had links to copyright infringement.”

The companies oppose bills designed to curb access and payments to overseas websites that traffic in stolen content or counterfeit goods on the grounds that it could put them in legal peril.

The legislation has been a major priority for entertainment companies, publishers, pharmaceutical companies and many industry groups. They maintain the proposed law is critical to curbing online piracy they say costs them billions of dollars annually.

Internet companies have furiously opposed the legislation and have stepped up lobbying efforts in recent months, arguing it would undermine innovation and free speech rights, compromise the functioning of the Internet, and would be ineffective in stopping piracy.

The bills were seemingly on the fast track for approval by Congress until the White House criticized aspects of it over the weekend.

Big tech names including Facebook and Twitter declined to participate despite their opposition to the House of Representatives’ Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s PROTECT Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). The companies were not prepared to sacrifice a day’s worth of revenue and risk the ire of users for a protest whose impact on lawmakers would be hard to gauge.

Google’s solution allows the search engine giant to keep revenue attached to its searches, while still highlighting the issue.

“This publicity stunt does a disservice to its users by promoting fear instead of facts,” said Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a sponsor of SOPA. “Perhaps during the blackout, Internet users can look elsewhere for an accurate definition of online piracy.”

Former Senator Chris Dodd, who now chairs the Motion Picture Association of America, labeled the blackout a “gimmick” and called for its supporters to “stop the hyperbole and PR stunts and engage in meaningful efforts to combat piracy.”

Bill Allison, editorial director of the Sunlight Foundation, which aims to create a transparent government, said the in-your-face public lobbying effort was “very effective.”

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Source: Reuters

Facebook has been eager to demonstrate that social networks do not create an ‘echo chamber’, where users only come into contact with the opinions of a few like-minded, close friends. This is particularly important as sharing web links becomes a larger part of the site than posting more personal ‘status updates’.

Writing on the Facebook blog, Eytan Bakshy of the site’s data science team said that “Social networking technologies like Facebook let us connect to hundreds, even thousands of people – and have fundamentally changed how people get their information. We found that even though people are more likely to consume and share information that comes from close contacts that they interact with frequently, the vast majority of information comes from contacts that they interact with infrequently.”

Bakshy’s study is “among the first to rigorously quantify influence at a mass scale”, Facebook said. “The research also suggests that Facebook isn’t the echo chamber that some might expect – social networks actually encourage the spread of novel information and diverse view points,” it claimed.

Bakshy added that “distant contacts are also more likely to share novel information, demonstrating that social networks can act as a powerful medium for sharing new ideas, highlighting new products and discussing current events”.

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Source: Telegraph

Google confirmed in a statement that it will join Wikipedia, Reddit and other influential tech firms in staging protests of varying kinds against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), which are backed by big entertainment and media interests.

“Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet,” a Google spokeswoman said. “So tomorrow we will be joining many other tech companies to highlight this issue on our US home page.”

In response to questions about how the protest link would appear, Google said it would not replace the company logo.

None of the protests are as dramatic as the one planned by Wikipedia. The English version of the Web encyclopedia is scheduled to go dark for 24 hours to protest the legislation.

The past weekend will likely long be remembered as a turning point in the debate over how to fight online piracy in the United States. Supporters of SOPA and PIPA once could boast of wide bipartisan support but suffered a series of blows starting on Thursday to eliminate an important provision in PIPA.

By Friday, both houses of Congress had eliminated a requirement in each bill that would have required U.S. Internet service providers to cut off access to foreign sites accused of piracy.

Following that, a group of Senators–some who once supported PIPA–requested that a vote on the bill be delayed. It was denied but things kept getting worse for antipiracy proponents. The White House, which was considered an ally of the music and film industries, suggested in a statement that the president would not support several cornerstone provisions of the bills.

It all culminated on what may come to be known in the entertainment sector as Black Sunday. Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp. and one of the world’s preeminent media tycoons, displayed a rare public tantrum via Twitter. In his posts he accused the president of taking his marching orders from “Silicon Valley paymasters.” He suggested Google was whipping up the opposition and was a “piracy leader.”

Murdoch’s posts were startling. There was no hiding it anymore; copyright owners were alarmed. The tide of the legislation battle had changed and the opposition appeared to have the upper hand.

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Source: CBS NEWS

It’s a lot of pressure, and something a group of lucky Swedish people have had to think about as the innovative “public” Twitter account “@sweden” allows different people to tweet whatever they like each week.

Currently it’s advertising exec and part-time farmer (no, really), Anders Dalenius in control, whose mini biography can be found at the project’s website, CuratorsOfSweden.com.

Of course it’s all a stunt to boost tourism, but as stunts to boost tourism go, you’ve got to admit it’s a pretty ingenious one.

To give you a taste of just what Andres has been tweeting about on behalf of the Scandinavian nation, we’ve compiled a little gallery of his “greatest hits” for you below – and be sure to follow him for more updates and to see who’s in charge in the new year!

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Source: Huffington Post UK

The network, which launched to the public in September, currently has around 62 million users, dwarfed by Facebook’s global reach of around 800 million.

However, Google have been busy in recent months integrating the network into their search facility and the Android mobile operating system.

According to web entrepreneur Paul Allen (and reported in The Telegraph), more than 600 thousand users are signing up to Google+ daily, with the total number of users expected to reach 200 million by the summer.

“I expect the growth to continue to accelerate however,” said Allen.

“Google can continue to integrate Google+ into its other products and word of mouth will continue to build. Most importantly, 700,000 Android devices are activated daily and this will become a very significant source of new users for Google+. That number will also grow next year.”

“As more users sign up, the value of the network will increase for everyone. The network effect will become powerful. It won’t be long before new users start encountering family and friends as well as the thriving tech and media sharing community that embraced Google+ early on.”

Allen concludes that 2012 will be the “breakout year” for Google+, predicting it will end next December with around 400 million users.

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Source: Huffington Post UK