Facebook

Sean Parker on his wedding, redwoods, and death threats

So much for the honeymoon.

Sean Parker -- Napster co-founder, first Facebook president, portrayed on the big screen by Justin Timberlake -- had expected to spend early June relaxing with his longtime girlfriend and new bride, Alexandra Lenas.

Instead, the newlyweds and their newborn are holed up at an undisclosed location in Menlo Park, Calif., while Parker works the phones to get out his side of a story he describes as "simultaneously the silliest and the most damaging PR crisis that I've had to deal with."

If you've missed the uproar, just Google "Sean Parker … Read more

'Neda' four years later and other viral moments

Four years after a hotly contested presidential election, Iranians head back to the polls Friday. A lot has been said and written about the circumstances surrounding the 2009 vote as well as its aftermath. But one of the more lasting images came when a video captured the final moments of a young woman who bled to death after being shot during a Tehran demonstration.

Almost immediately, pictures of Neda Agha-Soltan went viral, and the 26-year-old music student turned into a symbol for the opposition challenging President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election. Of course, Neda's was not the first image … Read more

U.S. embassy Facebook video sparks anger from Pakistanis

A seemingly benign promo video for the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, which was posted to Facebook on Wednesday, has sparked some angry commenter back-and-forth on the social network.

It appears that it's not necessarily what's in the video that bothers Pakistanis, but rather the reminder of the U.S. presence in Pakistan at a time when relations between the two countries are clearly strained.

The video, "Sunday in Islamabad with Ambassador Olson," shows the ambassador donned in a pink button-up and khaki slacks cruising around Pakistan's capital city chatting with people, sampling the local … Read more

Facebook struggles with monetizing search, kills sponsored results

Facebook is removing sponsored results from search less than a year after the ad unit's introduction.

"In keeping with the goal of streamlining our ad products, starting in July advertisers will no longer be able to buy sponsored results," a Facebook spokesperson told CNET.

The failed unit, which let marketers target users during the search process, suggests that the company is still struggling to understand how best to monetize search attention, something that competitor Google mastered long ago. Sponsored results seemed to be modeled after Google's sponsored search ads. As a user typed in a query … Read more

Wrapp hits 15 million digital gift cards, raises $15 million

Wrapp, the company that lets Facebook friends send digital gift cards to one another, has picked up $15 million from investors in the mobile manufacturing and mobile payments industries.

The money is going toward the development of the app's latest feature: brand pages. Users can now follow a brand for special deals for themselves.

"The whole idea with Wrapp is to build a win-win relationship between consumers and retailers," CEO Hjalmar Winbladh told CNET. Wrapp will start to add other features as well, he said.

The company is truly mobile first, according to Winbladh. Wrapp users access … Read more

Parse hits 100,000 apps after Facebook acquisition

SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook's latest acquisition, Parse, announced on Wednesday evening that it has grown 25 percent since the social network bought it two months ago.

Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar told an audience at a World Wide Developers Conference event that the platform has grown by 20,000 apps since last month.

"We agreed to have Facebook buy us to accelerate our vision," he said.

Facebook bought developer platform Parse in April, letting the social network dip into the back end of thousands of mobile applications. More apps, more data.

Third-party apps are important to Facebook because … Read more

Facebook's Parse now powering 100,000 apps

Parse is simultaneously shooting down naysayers and tooting its own horn with the announcement that it's now powering more than 100,000 applications, a 25 percent increase since being picked up by Facebook.

At the end of April, Facebook purchased 2-year-old Parse, a backend services provider for mobile-app makers, for a reported $85 million as part of an ongoing strategy to entice developers to incorporate Facebook hooks into their apps. The deal also had the potential to scare away future or existing customers worried that Facebook would abuse its power as the new landlord of their data.

But that … Read more

Breast cancer activists win battle with Facebook over mastectomy photos

Facebook has clarified its policy against nudity to allow for postmastectomy photos after a run-in with vocal breast cancer awareness advocates disgruntled by the social network's practice of removing photos depicting mastectomy scars.

In May, Scorchy Barrington, a woman with Stage IV breast cancer, petitioned Facebook executives through Change.org to end the company's practice of censoring photos of men and women who have undergone mastectomies. Barrington said Facebook was removing photos from the SCAR Project Page, which features photographs of young breast cancer survivors, and that Facebook had banned project founder and photographer David Jay from the … Read more

Facebook adds hashtags, mends missing link to pop culture

Facebook has added support for hashtags, fixing a broken link that prevented its 1.11 billion members from associating themselves with celeb gossip, breaking news, and popular memes.

"Starting today, hashtags will be clickable on Facebook. Similar to other services like Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pinterest, hashtags on Facebook allow you to add context to a post or indicate that it is part of a larger discussion," the company wrote in a blog post Wednesday announcing the update. "When you click on a hashtag in Facebook, you'll see a feed of what other people and Pages … Read more