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On Monday we heard that Facebook was allowing current employees to sell a delineated portion of their common stock, something that the company confirmed on Tuesday.

Now, VentureBeat's Eric Eldon, who also originally reported the Facebook tidbit, says that LinkedIn employees are going to have the option of doing the same. The business social network, Eldon wrote, is allowing current employees to sell 20 percent of their equity in the company at a $500 million valuation. That's quite a bit lower than the billion-dollar valuation reportedly bestowed upon the company after its recent $53 million Series D funding … Read more

A sharp-eyed tipster told Nick O'Neill at All Facebook that the social network has modified the metrics it uses to track user activity on developer applications.

Instead of reporting how many daily active users an application has, Facebook now reports its monthly active users. The reason, company representatives said, is that while there's no universal metric that applies to all applications, monthly generally works better than daily: education applications might peak during the week, movie-related apps could have higher traffic on weekends, and some games might see their peak during boring afternoons at the office. Plenty of "… Read more

I just watched this video demo of Zembly, a relatively new service that you create collaborative applications on the fly and deploy them to services like Facebook, Meebo, and the iPhone.

There's lots of widgets and Javascript involved, but it seems easy to use and overall Zembly is an interesting product as it lets users actually manipulate walled-garden content.

It's also interesting in that the company makes use of a wide array of open APIs and developed their own to create a networked effect of usage.

In a bit of a twist, Zembly runs on Solaris and Sun … Read more

Developers, start your engines: submissions are now open for the developer application contest that Facebook created for its FBFund grant program. Winning developers, who submit business plans for their prototypical Facebook Platform applications, will receive between $25,000 and $250,000 in grant money. The company plans to give away $10 million total.

The contest was originally detailed at this year's F8 conference, in which the 10 original FBFund selectees were also unveiled.

Monday saw the kickoff of the competition's Round 1, in which 25 winning proposals announced on September 22 will each be awarded $25,000. The … Read more

If you see an increase in the number of 20-somethings driving nice cars around Palo Alto any time soon, maybe this is why: VentureBeat reported Monday that Facebook is ready to let current employees unload a fifth of their stock options, at the company's internal valuation of $4 billion. It's slated to start this fall. For early employees of the company, which was founded in a Harvard dorm room, this could mean some legit cash.

Facebook's valuation was reported at $15 billion when Microsoft took a $240 million stake last year, but the company has backtracked on … Read more

It's no surprise to anyone who reads blogs about celebrity gossip, nightlife, indie music, or pretty much any other niche of pop culture: American Apparel, the Los Angeles-based retailer infamous for bringing back the '80s aerobics look, has been named by ComScore as the top apparel outlet in the online ad world.

In other words, that means their ads, many of which feature nubile young models clad in just about nothing, are freaking everywhere on the Web.

A total of 483,389,000 American Apparel ad impressions were seen across the Web in April, reaching a whopping 48,887,… Read more

In a kulturkampf between old and new, several hundred youthful Facebook activists are increasingly under pressure from Egyptian authorities.

Earlier in the year, a group of young Egyptians used Facebook to organize support for a strike by textile workers on April 6. To put it mildly, Egypt's authoritarian government did not welcome this extension of civil society into cyberspace.

They liked it even less when the so-called 6 April Youth Movement, as they call themselves, met for the first time in late June at a Cairo gathering where they were feted by the local journalists' syndicate.

Facebook might be neutral on the subject, but it is fair to say that Scrabulous was an enormous success for its business. And, while Wordscraper may have a chance of some success, the company has found something it believes could be even bigger.

"When your goal is to get long-term usage and engagement, it's hard to find new and imaginative ways to secure people's attention," said an insider.

In short, you can't just copy something that's been around for a while and has illuminated lifeless dinner parties since people started experimenting with pre-marital sex.… Read more

One of my favorite Facebook features is auto-tagging. It happened to me last night by accident and ended up being one of those very rare moments of using a product where I got a big grin on my face. The feature comes into play when the service recognizes that a photo or video upload happened around the same general time of an event you said you were planning to attend through Facebook's party planning tools. If your photo or video upload occurs within these conditions you'll be prompted to have it automatically tagged and dropped into the event'… Read more