The Social

Business networking site LinkedIn has confirmed reports that its founder, Reid Hoffman, will return to the CEO post to replace resigning CEO Dan Nye.

Hoffman had stepped down as CEO in 2006 but remained chairman of the board and stayed active in product development operations. This month, LinkedIn hired Dipchand Nishar as vice president of products, with the objective of taking over some of the duties that Hoffman had been handling. Meanwhile, former Yahoo executive Jeff Wiener, currently the executive in residence at Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, will take over as interim president at LinkedIn.

Nye plans to step down in mid-January. No reason was provided for his departure.

"Dan joined LinkedIn with a mission to help us build a company that was strong and sustainable. In two years, he has succeeded in this objective, transforming LinkedIn from a young start up to a high growth business," Hoffman said in a release. LinkedIn does not make its financials completely public, but says it has been profitable since 2007.

"Dan deserves tremendous credit for his contributions to LinkedIn. His passion and commitment will continue in the efforts of the team that he's helped build here."

Currently, LinkedIn has about 33 million members and has raised more than $100 million in venture capital, giving it a valuation that's reportedly right around $1 billion.

Fox might mean business, but it also means unintentional comedy.

(Credit: Fox Business Network)

The Writers Guild of America can keep up its strike--there's plenty of unscripted comedy on the fledgling Fox Business Network.

On its morning show, Money for Breakfast (full disclosure: I have been a guest on Money for Breakfast), anchor Alexis Glick accidentally reported that Apple had taken an 8 percent stake in chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices.

"There's some news coming across the tape right now," Glick said on the live program. "We're seeing from Wall Street Journal that Apple is buying an 8 percent stake in AMD."

Money for Breakfast host Alexis Glick

(Credit: Fox Business Network)

In fact, it was the government of the United Arab Emirates state of Abu Dhabi, not Apple, that had purchased the stake in AMD. Yes, yes, I know Steve Jobs' Cupertino empire really could be mistaken for a cash-flooded sovereignty sometimes. But let's be serious. Apple? Abu Dhabi?

When the mistake became clear, Glick's co-host, Peter Barnes, said, "Oh, the Arabs. OK." To make matters worse, the program even referred to the country incorrectly, as "Abu Dubai," not "Abu Dhabi."

Even funnier, contributing analyst Charles Payne--the founder and CEO of Wall Street Strategies--had gone right along with the gaffe. "That's real smart by Apple because AMD is in trouble right now," he had said to Glick. "AMD has always had two problems: either it had a great product that was either sometimes superior to Intel but not the distribution, or it would have a terrible product that obviously they couldn't compete."

Never mind the fact that Apple has been stocking its computers with, um, Intel chips, and has been doing so for over two years. If Jobs & Co. had bought a stock in AMD, that'd be beyond huge news.

It doesn't look like any video of the snafu has surfaced (yet), but check out the transcript, courtesy of the Silicon Alley Insider. It literally reads like something out of Anchorman or a Saturday Night Live skit:

It hasn't happened yet, nor is there a timeline for it, but Facebook has stated that it's working on allowing its members to "organize that long list of friends into groups so you can decide more specifically who sees what." No formal announcement was made, but you can see the little tidbit--along with something about forthcoming "daily digest" e-mail options--on the What's New on Facebook page. It looks like TechCrunch was the first to spot this.

"Friend grouping" is a move that, unless the company really screws it up, Facebook members are very likely to applaud.

Technically speaking, it's hardly revolutionary. The Six Apart-owned blogging pioneer LiveJournal, for example, has allowed the simple creation of "custom friend groups" for years. But what you have to understand about Facebook is that millions of young "early adopters" signed up with the (not particularly forward-thinking) expectation that the only people who'd be seeing their profiles were their college friends and other contemporaries.

Several years later, many of those then-college students are now young professionals; Facebook's new open-registration policy has allowed their colleagues and relatives to create accounts; and there are a whole lot of St. Patrick's Day Keg Race photos circa 2004 (and office happy-hour photos circa 2007) that perhaps those members don't want their bosses or parents to be seeing.

Presumably, if Facebook members are able to sort their contacts into custom groups, they'll be able to display varying degrees of profile data to those groups. That way, for example, your boss might only be able to see your profile photograph and work information, whereas your college buddies would be able to keep reminiscing about the old days with those St. Patrick's Day snapshots.

This will put Facebook even further ahead of "openness"-advocating rivals like Plaxo Pulse, which lets members group their contacts into "friends," "family" and "work" but doesn't allow any custom functionality.