Excursions

MIAMI--The overwhelmingly young and male audience at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) event this week tells you that it's one of those conferences where the attendees don't tend to be marketers, finance guys, or advertisers: they're the kids who write the code.

A company like Facebook obviously wants to be there, and at past FOWA events it's used the soapbox opportunity to market developer initiatives like its application platform and Facebook Connect log-in tool. But this year the focus was instead on open source, with relatively recent hire David Recordon taking the stage rather than … Read more

LOS ANGELES--Twitter didn't rake in $100 million because it was about to run out of money, investor and board member Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital said in a panel at the 140 Conference on Tuesday morning.

There was still money left over, Sabet explained, from what the company had raised from Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners in February, which followed Twitter's Series C round in the spring of 2008. Twitter, according to Sabet, raised the money from Insight Venture Partners and T. Rowe Price last month because it wanted to grow up: hire new people, launch new … Read more

DUBLIN, Calif.--Don't tase me, bro. Really.

CNET News took a trip to the Alameda County Sheriff's Office Regional Training Center on Friday to have a look at some of the newest equipment from Taser, which was among the companies showing off weaponry at the UrbanShield 2009 training event. The electric-shock gadgets are controversial and have drummed up some bad press over the years for causing the occasional serious injury or even fatality. But the company has maintained its insistence that they are significantly safer than the alternative (i.e. guns).

We didn't get to tase anybody. … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Two of the biggest rumors about big, upcoming Facebook products--an ad network and a payment transaction platform--won't be making a big splash anytime soon, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said in a talk on Wednesday afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit.

"We're asked it all the time," Sandberg said on the question of whether Facebook would be launching an ad network for external Web sites using the Facebook Connect universal-login product. "We focus on building products for users and we think about the monetization later. And I'm not saying that in a … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--More than 8 billion minutes are spent on Facebook every day, Facebook executive Mike Schroepfer said in a talk Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit here.

Some 2 billion pieces of content are shared every week, and 2 billion photos are uploaded each month--1.2 million served per second on a "peak day," he said. Five billion calls to Facebook's application program interface (API) were made on Tuesday. It's huge: Schroepfer, Facebook's vice president of engineering, was focused on talking about the challenges of scaling a social network to the more than 300 million active users … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--In anticipation of an onstage interview with Twitter CEO Evan Williams at the Web 2.0 Summit on Tuesday afternoon, conference organizer and Federated Media CEO John Battelle told the audience to expect "a surprise" during the talk.

Turns out that "surprise" was actually a recently unearthed video clip of Williams in 1994, explaining the Internet on behalf of a company called Illumination Labs and sporting a haircut that looked like it belonged on the set of '90s alterna-teen flick "Empire Records." (No, we don't have a snapshot of it yet.)

Williams … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Cable companies get a lot of criticism from the Silicon Valley set for being some of the ultimate 20th century corporate dinosaurs. Or, as Web 2.0 Summit conference organizer John Battelle put it, "a dead duck."

So the head of Comcast, a company that's taken loads of heat from tech experts--for imposing bandwidth caps, poor customer service, and an alleged failure to innovate on both broadband speeds and the convergence between television and the Web--was an interesting choice to kick off the summit event here on Tuesday. But Comcast CEO Brian Roberts spun his company … Read more

PALO ALTO, Calif.-- Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg admitted in a talk here on Thursday evening that the company's response to a database outage that knocked out approximately 150,000 user accounts was "too slow."

"It's a very small percentage of our users, but it's a lot of people," Sandberg said of the affected users. "We want them to be able to (access Facebook) every day. We resolved it in about a week and a half. I think that was too slow."

Numerous Facebook users began complaining early this month … Read more

PALO ALTO, Calif.--"The stream of information coming at you can be overwhelming," Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said when asked in an onstage interview what she thinks of social-networking fatigue. "I think people sometimes feel uncomfortable hitting 'ignore' (on friend requests), but if you don't want to connect to someone, that's why it's there."

Facebook, after all, is on top of the world. It doesn't make much difference to the health of that 300 million-member user base if your "social graph" is one degree smaller.

Sandberg, who … Read more