Facebook‘s revenues doubled in the first half of the year to $1.6 billion, according to a report.
Reuters says Facebook’s net income for the period hit $500 million, citing “a source with knowledge of [Facebook’s] financials.”
via Facebook Doubles Revenues in the First Half of 2011 to $1.6 Billion [REPORT].
According to a new study, 65 percent of American adult Internet users have interacted on a social media site like Facebook, Google+, or LinkedIn, supporting the often cited importance of social media marketing.
The social networking report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project has been asking adult Internet users in the United States about social media site visits since 2005 when just 8 percent of Internet users 18-years-old or older had visited one of the sites, compared with 65 percent just six years later. What’s more, for the first time, more than half of all American adults — Internet user or not — has visited a site like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+.
via Adult Internet Users Are Socialites, Study Finds | Practical eCommerce.
Unpretentious and easy to approach, Codeacademy makes coding so enjoyable, it’s hard to believe you’re actually learning something. The website starts users off small, offering tutorials on how to use some very basic JavaScript commands. Each lesson is incrementally progressive and conversational in tone, making it easy to advance your skills without breaking a sweat. Each time you reach a new plateau of coding knowledge, users are awarded with a virtual trophy, making the time spent learning how to do something useful feel a like playing a game.
A well known security firm warns that the number of compromised digital security certificates from DigiNotar, a Dutch certificate authority outfit owned by VASCO Data Security International, has doubled in size over the past week from 250 false SSL certificates to 531. False certificates have now been issued for Facebook, Google, Tor, Skype, Mossad, CIA, MI6, Twitter, and several other high profile sites.
“This is really bad news. As DigiNotar is a ‘root’ certificate, they can assign authority to intermediaries to sign and validate certificates on their behalf,” security firm Sophos explains. “It appears the attackers signed 186 certificates that could have been intermediate certificates. These certificates masqueraded as well-known certificate authorities like Thawte, Verisign, Comodo, and Equifax.”
According to Sophos, computers users of IE and Safari on Windows 7/Vista/2008/2008R2 and/or Chrome and Firefox on all platforms are immune from exploitation, so long as you’re rocking a fully patched browser and OS. Things aren’t as peachy for Apple users.
via Maximum PC | Hackers Issue Rogue SSL Certificates for CIA, MI6, and Mossad; Apple Stands Pat.
While those of us in the United States dove into a three-day Labor Day weekend, the rest of the world was still humming along, and your Mashable weekend team was here to keep track of it all.
Unfortunately, as evidenced in the video embedded below, a newly appointed Page admin can remove the Page creator’s admin status, which can be very nasty in certain cases. Today, Facebook Pages are more than fun, they’re a serious part of business promotion and losing administrative access to a Page can lead to host of problems.
Fast Flip is one of nine in a batch of products to be discontinued from Google Labs. The company announced it would shutter Labs experiments shortly after releasing its second-quarter earnings results in mid-July.
Other Labs products Google will shut down:
Aardvark: Social search product that helps people answer each others’ questions.
Desktop: Gives instant access to data while online or offline.
Fast Flip: Provides a faster, richer news content browsing and reading experience.
Google Maps API for Flash: Allows ActionScript developers to integrate Google Maps into their applications.
Google Pack: Makes it easy to download and install a package of Google and third-party applications.
Google Web Security: Protects against web malware attacks.
Image Labeler: Helps people explore and label images on the web.
Notebook: Helps people combine clipped URLs from the web and free-form notes into documents they can share and publish.
Sidewiki: A browser sidebar that lets people contribute and read information alongside any web page.
Subscribed Links: Enables developers to create specialized search results that were added to the normal Google search results on relevant queries for subscribed users.
In 1990, Godwin got fed up with Nazi comparisons on bulletin boards, Usenet newsgroups, and the WELL discussion site. So prevalent had these comparisons become that Godwin began to wonder “how debates had ever occurred without having that handy rhetorical hammer.”He believed that most of these comparisons simply trivialized the Holocaust and the true horror of the Nazi regime and so consciously decided to build a “countermeme designed to make discussion participants see how they were and are acting as vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme.” The result was Godwins Law in its original form:As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
via No Nazi comparisons? Sounds like something Hitler would say!.
Imagine you found a great deal on a flux capacitor. Not only does it make time travel possible, but the new version is able to freeze time and only requires half a gigawatt to operate. Plus, it’s 33 percent cheaper than the one Doc Brown built into the DeLorean. Sounds like a no brainer, until you read a couple online reviews claiming it set their cars on fire. And so you remove it from your shopping cart. This isn’t unusual, and according to a new study, it happens far more often than not.
via Maximum PC | Study: Negative Online Reviews Influence 80 Percent of Shoppers.
Over the last twelve months, its BandPage application has grown from around 3 million monthly active users and 150,000 daily active users to 32.4 million MAU and 1.56 million DAU, according to our AppData tracking service. On Facebook, it is by far the largest Page app for musicians, and the seventh-largest app overall. By some measures, it is now bigger than long-time leading music fan site MySpace.
via RootMusic Raises $16 Million Second Round, Following Hit BandPage Facebook App for Musicians.