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It's kind of like this: an indie rock band gets signed to a major label, and after a taste of the high life, the bassist jumps ship.

On Sunday, word got out that Adam D'Angelo, chief technology officer at Facebook and a friend of founder Mark Zuckerberg since high school, had submitted his resignation on Friday. D'Angelo had been one of Facebook's first employees, though he did not have formal "co-founder" status.

Reports swirled that he was at odds with Zuckerberg, or that he was no longer interested in the position; whatever the reason, … Read more

All gold rushes must come to an end, and according to one new report, Facebook's developer platform is no exception.

Facebook developer Jesse Farmer, creator of developer analytics service Adonomics, did an extensive amount of number-crunching after coming to an odd observation earlier this year: "Something is wrong in the Facebook developer community," Farmer wrote in a blog post Tuesday. "Starting in March I began noticing that the level of activity in the Facebook developers forum was dropping sharply."

Farmer's research confirmed his speculation: activity in the Facebook developer forum, from posts per day … Read more

This post was updated at 10:11 AM on Friday with comment from Chi.mp's Myles Weissleder.

SAN FRANCISCO--Wednesday night was a wild one.

As part of this week's Web 2.0 Expo, the ubiquitous digital-media blog Mashable enlisted a brand-new social-media site called Chi.mp to sponsor its all-night bash at a cavernous nightclub called Mighty. The open bar was flowing, the dance floor was seeing plenty of attention (a rarity at a tech industry party), and young women left and right were posing for photos with snappily-dressed Mashable overlord Pete Cashmore and numerous Chi.mp-branded trucker … Read more

Your boss might block access to Facebook on the job, but that hasn't stopped Forrester Research from estimating that social networking will be a huge priority of "Enterprise 2.0."

In a new report written for the market research firm, as detailed by Larry Dignan at CNET News.com's sibling site ZDNet, analyst G. Oliver Young predicts that "Enterprise 2.0" applications--buttoned-up versions of the Web 2.0 apps we all know and love--will be a $4.6 billion industry by 2013. Social networks, Young wrote, will make up the bulk of that, with … Read more

Buzznet.com CEO Tyler Goldman doesn't want people to think of his company as a social network. No, what Goldman says he's running is a music- and pop-culture-focused community site.

"We definitely wouldn't view ourselves as a social network, and we probably wouldn't disagree with folks that say the world doesn't need another social network," Goldman, a former executive at Movielink and founder of Broadband Sports, said in an interview. His preferred jargon? "Socially programmed communities." Buzznet, in other words, wants to be the 1980s-era MTV of the social-media age: an … Read more

Facebook chose a Sunday afternoon, when much of the tech blogger corps was pleasantly enjoying real life (we can hope), to start rolling out its previously announced instant-messaging client. That's likely no coincidence: this is a major new feature for the social-networking site, and debuting it on a weekend afternoon probably ensured a smoother integration.

A Facebook employee told me in the days before the launch that it was "a big challenge" to get ready to roll out Facebook Chat to the site's 67 million members. Because of that, Facebook has opted for a gradual rollout … Read more

With all the talk about social network aggregators over the past few weeks, you'd think they were going to reverse global warming.

Technology blogs have been chirping enthusiastically about "lifestreaming" services like FriendFeed and Socialthing, which claim to provide an answer to growing complaints about "social-networking fatigue." They sort updates across networking and community sites into a single destination--which, in a sense, actually might be the social-media world's equivalent of reversing global warming.

Unfortunately, they still don't get rid of the hot air.

Let me get this straight: The last time I checked, … Read more

Glancing at the many blog posts about AOL's unexpected acquisition of social network Bebo, there's no real consensus as to whether it's a smart idea. If anything, the collective mood of the Web's talking heads seems to be thus: if AOL can smoothly integrate Bebo with its AIM client and Platform-A ad network, great. Unfortunately, AOL doesn't have that kind of track record.

Perhaps the most optimistic of the bunch was CenterNetworks blogger Allen Stern, who said that this really can't be bad for AOL's advertising arm. "It brings their ad inventory for Platform-A … Read more

MIAMI--The Future of Web Apps conference here hasn't even started yet, but I'm already sensing a major theme of the weekend: social media really is a whole lot bigger than Silicon Valley.

I was sitting in the lobby of my hotel, writing a couple of blog posts because there's no in-room Wi-Fi (gotta make some sacrifices when choosing hotels in a luxury-saturated city like Miami) when a handful of 20- and 30-something guys with laptops came in and set up shop. Another, who'd been sitting across the room, came over and asked us if we were … Read more