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News of Instagram's revised terms of services agreement, which essentially allows the company to use your photos for advertising, have caused user backlash, but none so comical as the stir caused by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's sister.

Arielle Zuckerberg, who works for Google social-media marketing division Wildfire, hit her "Like" button today on an Instagram photo posted to Facebook by Instagram user and professional photographer Clayton Cubitt. The photo was a screenshot of a portion of the new terms of service, with a caption that read, "Instagram's suicide note."

The new terms, which … Read more

You might think this is the holiday season, but for Microsoft it is open season.

Yes, open season at pinching Google's lower cheeks, tweaking its upper ones, and generally trying to suggest that it's the most evil company since, oh, Microsoft.

Just how open this season is was shown by Microsoft's jefe of PR, the beautifully named Frank X. Shaw.

As Business Insider reports, Shaw saw a New York Times article describing Microsoft's hiring of PR combatant Mark Penn and his breakfast leaped toward his nose.

When indigestion hits you like this, you must immediately leap … Read more

The people have spoken -- just not enough of them to have an impact on Facebook's business or future.

First, there are the yeas versus the nays. In the voting on the giant social network's proposed policy changes, 589,141 users (87.5 percent) opposed the changes, and 79,731 were in support. But then there's the threshold: according to Facebook's voting laws, an enforceable verdict required participation by 30 percent (300 million) of Facebook's billion users. The total vote count of 668,872 was just 0.0668 percent of potential voters.

Now Facebook can … Read more

2012 was a year Mark Zuckerberg will remember vividly -- and not just because he turned 28 and married his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Chan. The year will go down as the one in which Zuckerberg came out from under his hoodie and began to prove his talents as a leader of one of the titans of consumer tech. His rock-star persona helped as he wooed Wall Street and pulled off the biggest Internet IPO in history, raising $16 billion. But we all know what happened next: The stock cratered and Zuckerberg quickly went from idol to villain -- at least … Read more

Wielding both wealth and influence, Bill Gates is the world's fourth most powerful person, as ranked by Forbes.

Rising to fourth place from fifth last year, Gates was cited by Forbes for his vast fortune. The Microsoft co-founder is worth $65 billion even after donating more than $28 billion toward various causes.

But it's also his mission and his influence that make Gates a powerful man.

As co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he's been on a quest to stamp out a variety of diseases around the world. As Forbes notes, Gates estimates that the … Read more

You've heard it said countless times: A picture's worth a thousand words.

If you think that's not at least as true online as it is offline, you haven't been paying attention to the explosive machinations in the war for digital real estate going on in Silicon Valley over the last year or so.

Today, the tech world is all worked up over the latest in the slow-moving war of attrition between Instagram and Twitter. By cutting off Twitter Card integration, Instagram is hoping to wean its users off Twitter.

This is a seismic event, especially with … Read more

In an effort to make billions of dollars by suing Facebook, Paul Ceglia is actually putting a large dent in his own wallet.

Federal Magistrate Leslie Foschio ordered Ceglia to pay the social network almost $90,000 in attorney fees today, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The order comes because of Ceglia's last-minute cancellation of legal depositions that Facebook had already paid its lawyers to do. Foschio also ordered Ceglia to reimburse an additional $7,000 in travel and lodging expenses for the social network's experts that were to be deposed.

Ceglia is suing Facebook with the … Read more

If Facebook had a tagline for this stage in its evolution, it would be "Made for people by Mark." It flows out of the mission statement -- "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected" -- and the co-founder Mark Zuckerberg's iron grip on where Facebook is heading. It also drives Facebook's effort to design stuff, including ads, that its billion-plus customers will really "like," and share with their friends. And, it helps keep the legion of Facebook engineers from getting preoccupied with innovations that … Read more

Zynga has been in a downward spiral the past several months. It's been hit from all sides, from plummeting share prices to Anonymous cyberattacks to a mass exodus of its top employees.

Despite CEO Mark Pincus' public positive attitude and go-getter mentality about the future of the gaming company, an article by the Wall Street Journal today reports that he may be less enthusiastic behind the scenes. According to interviews with dozens of current and former Zynga employees and investors, Pincus is apparently grappling with how to save the company.

During a September meeting between Pincus and business coach … Read more