zuckerberg

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday that Director of Platform Bret Taylor has been promoted to chief technology officer--a position that the company had not previously counted among its ranks.

Taylor joined Facebook last summer when the company acquired his start-up FriendFeed, a social-media aggregator that was rife with ex-Google engineering talent and Silicon Valley early-adopter hype, but slow on mainstream uptake. Shortly after Taylor and his team joined Facebook, the company open-sourced the Tornado server, which powered FriendFeed's impressive real-time streaming capabilities.

The reasoning behind Taylor's promotion appears to be logistical, judging by an internal e-mail from Facebook that was conveniently forwarded to TechCrunch. &… Read more

Let it be known that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wanted a book to be written about the company he founded. At the top of the acknowledgments for journalist David Kirkpatrick's new book about Facebook, "The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World," Kirkpatrick makes it clear. "Had (Zuckerberg) not encouraged me to write this book and cooperated as I did so, it would likely not have happened."

"The Facebook Effect," which will be available for purchase Tuesday, is the most extensive work written about the ubiquitous social-networking … Read more

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckberberg has had a tough few weeks.

At a Facebook developer's conference on April 21, he announced some changes to Facebook's privacy policy, including the "Instant Personalization" program that "connects" Facebook members' information on some third-party sites, including Yelp and Pandora. He also announced that, going forward, application developers would be able to hang on to user information indefinitely, rather than having to purge the information from their servers daily. The developers in the audience cheered these announcements, but some of Facebook's critics jeered them, touching off a backlash that … Read more

There was a distinct tension in Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's rhetoric as he unveiled major changes to the massive social network's much-maligned member privacy controls in a press conference on Wednesday.

On one hand, he said that the demand was there from concerned members and lawmakers to do something about confusing privacy settings and changes to how members' data is used in the wake of its F8 developer conference. On the other, he repeatedly insisted that the social network's nearly 500 million users do, in fact, want to share information rather than keep things as private as … Read more

Facebook rolls out its new privacy changes live during our show! How nice of them. In a nutshell, near as we can tell, everything is going to be simpler and Facebook is really sorry that they really mean it about the whole privacy thing. And we get that, but we need some time to get over it, you know? Also, the DOJ may be looking into Apple's iTunes monopoly and we have a big discussion about the future of American space shuttle. Get your emails ready now.

Editor's note: We used Cover It Live for this event, so if you missed the live blog, you can still replay it in the embedded component at the end of this post. We also included the updates by Declan McCullagh and other CNET contributors, as well as unedited commentaries in regular text here. To get the key points and some analysis from today's announcements, click here.

After one of the most tumultuous months in its young history, Facebook has some new features intended to offer its hundreds of millions of users simpler privacy choices.

Wednesday morning's announcement, … Read more

It's appropriate that Facebook, over the years, has liked to talk about itself as a sort of digital sovereignty. Way back in January of 2009, when CEO Mark Zuckerberg proudly announced on the company blog that the social network had 150 million users around the world he added the factoid, "If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria."

Facebook is now approaching half a billion active users, making it more populous than every country on Earth except for India and China. So what'… Read more

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg issues a statement about privacy

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Google now offers encrypted search

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After one of the most tumultuous months in its young history, Facebook is planning to announce features intended to offer its hundreds of millions of users simpler privacy choices.

The last few weeks have not been kind to the Internet's second most popular Web site, which has been pilloried by privacy activists and slammed by some members of Congress. The flap has spawned clever interactive graphics showing how Facebook has gradually exposed more user data, tools to fix your privacy settings, and reports of internal discord among employees who may fear that the negative attention would jeopardize a lucrative … Read more