Feds : Facebook funding anti-Google legislation
May 3, 2012
Facebook appears to be in the spotlight for funding a “non-profit” to attack Google … when in reality it appears to have been fully funded by for profit Facebook.
The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and a top FTC staffer traded emails in 2010 about whether Facebook and other tech companies were secretly funding a nonprofit group pushing hard for regulators to investigate Google Inc.
The messages, revealed in internal emails recently obtained by The Washington Times through the Freedom of Information Act, were exchanged as the FTC was being asked by the California-based group Consumer Watchdog to investigate Google’s “Street View” mapping project. The project came under scrutiny after Google said it had mistakenly harvested personal data from homeowners’ unsecured wireless networks..
The FTC correspondence centered on a May 18, 2010, report by the Wall Street Journal, “FTC Likely to Examine Google’s Wireless Gaffe,” which noted how Consumer Watchdog called on the FTC to launch a probe. The article prompted Cecelia Prewett, director of the FTC’s public affairs office, to send an email to colleagues asking, “Who’s feeding him?”
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Yes we made the Open Letter to Facebook
April 18, 2012
Yes We made the apparently viral QR code to facebook. 
You can use your facebook account to comment below if you want to voice your thoughts on timeline.
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Testing Plugin Part #2
March 28, 2012
This is another test of a wordpress plugin, please comment on facebook as they should technically show up here as well.
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Paul Ceglia - leaked e-mails - Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg
April 14, 2011
We discussed the story back in August, and at the time were dismissed as “not plausible” but low and behold, it appears we were right.
Mr Ceglia has released a dozen emails which he claims were sent between July 2003 and July 2004.
November 22, 2003 - Mr Zuckerberg to Mr Ceglia
‘I have recently met with a couple of upperclassmen here at Harvard that are planning to launch a site very similar to ours. If we don’t make a move soon, I think we will lose the advantage we would have if we release before them.
‘I’ve stalled them for the time being and with a break if you could send another $1000 for the facebook (sic) project it would allow me to pay my roommate or Jeff to help integrate the search code and get the site live before them. Please give me a call so that we can talk more about this.’
January 1, 2004 - Mr Zuckerberg to Mr Ceglia
I think it is unnecessary at this point, with all of the extra work I have done for you, to be held to the original completion date. I should not be penalized for delays that were out of my control, namely that there have been so many unspecified requests from the Streetfax project that you wanted to be placed as a priority, thereby delaying my start on our second project.
‘Thus, I am requesting a written waiver on your part exempting me from the obligation to give you additional ownership in the project that is outlined in our original contract.’
January 5 - Mr Ceglia to Mr Zuckerberg
‘It is well past January 1 and to my knowledge you don’t have a single thing done for the site… You know perfectly well that you can’t just take a person’s investment and then spend it on women and beer or whatever you do up there in Harvard.
‘I’ve been stalled long enough on this thing and if I don’t see something soon I’ll no choice but to contact the school and perhaps your parents in Dobbs Ferry and let them know what’s going on.’
February 2, 2004 - Mr Zuckerberg to Mr Ceglia
‘Paul, I have a rather serious issue to discuss with you, according to our contract I owe you over 30% more of the business in late penalties which would give you over 80% of the company.
‘First I want to say that I think that is completely unfair because I did so much extra work for you on your site that caused those delays in the first place and second I don’t even think it is legal to charge such a huge penalty.
Mostly though I just won’t even bother putting the site live if you are going to insist on such a large percentage. I’d like to suggest that you drop the penalty completely and that we officially return to 50/50 ownership.’
February 6, 2004 - Mr Zuckerberg to Mr Ceglia
Sorry it’s taken me a few days to respond, (sic) Now that the sites (sic) live I feel I must take creative control and I just can not risk injuring my sites (sic) reputation by cheapening it with your idea of selling college junk, nor do I wish to spend my time shipping out coffee mugs to rich alumni. The site is cool as it is and I don’t care about making any money on it right now, I just want to see if people will use it.
February 7, 2004 - Mr Ceglia to Mr Zuckerberg
Mark, all I can think is your parents have handed you everything your entire life and after all this time and energy and MONEY that you think in your head that an ok way to act is to just say - oh I’ve changed my mind I don’t think it’s cool to make money and that that should be that.
April 6, 2004 - Mr Zuckerberg to Mr Ceglia
Paul, I have become too busy to deal with the site and no one wants to pay for it, so I am thinking of just taking the server down. My parents have a fund that I can tap into for my college expenses and I would just like to give you your two thousand dollars back and call it even on the rest of the money you owe me for the extra work. At this point I won’t even really be able to work on the facebook until Summer.April 6, 2004 - Mr Ceglia to Mr Zuckerberg
‘Grow up, take a f***ing ethics class, choke yourself with that silver spoon of yours’.
July 22, 2004 - Mr Zuckerberg to Mr Ceglia (A week before the company was incorporated)
‘Paul, I am guessing that you don’t want to talk to me but I wanted to say happy birthday and that I hope to resolve our differences. I see that what I did was wrong and I am really sorry that I behaved as I did. Please give me your address and I will mail you back the $2000 for your trouble, more if it will repair our business relationship.
‘Another summer is here and I still don’t have any time to build our site, I understand that I promised I would, but other things have come up and I am out in California working during break. I just don’t want the obligation of having to answer to you for not following through and I won’t be able to. Best, Mark’
A ton of leaked e-mails proves that Paul Ceglia does in fact own half if NOT MORE of Facebook.
The purported contract (we analyzed it here) gave Ceglia a 50% ownership in “the face book” project in exchange for funding its initial development, as well as an additional 1% ownership of the project per day for every day that the project remained uncompleted past a certain launch date
Business Insiderhas just published what we already thought was true.
This might be the story of the century, as it does appear that in fact Mark Zuckerberg did steal facebook, not from one set of people, but rather from two.
The story is of course developing, but this will be fascinating to see how the court rules in light of the new evidence.
So what do you think? Did in Fact Mark Zuckerberg steal Facebook from Paul Ceglia and the twins?
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Paul Ceglia – The new owner of Facebook
August 18, 2010
Before there were hints and allegations that Mark Elliot Zuckerberg literally stole facebook.com from Paul Ceglia. The answer now appears to be yes. Showing the court a cleared check of $3000 dollars that Mark Zuckerberg cashed back in 2003 proves that there was a partnership. Here is a copy of the cleared check.
This is a photo of the new owner of Facebook.
Let’s see the courts decide on this one.
The agreement called for Zuckerberg to do computer coding work and provided for a $1,000 investment by Ceglia in a project called “The Face Book,” in exchange for a 50 percent stake, Ceglia claimed. A clause in the contract gave Ceglia an additional 34 percent for delays in the launching of the site, he claimed in court papers.
Giving Paul Ceglia a total of 84% ownership of “the facebook” which was eventually just known as Facebook.
Enjoy the new reality.
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Facebook fan page : “WILL NOT PAY $3.98 A MONTH TO USE FACEBOOK” reaches 600,000 members
April 27, 2010
In a blatant use of Facebook to condemn Facebook, the fan page called “I WILL NOT PAY $3.98 A MONTH TO USE FACEBOOK” has passed 600,000 fans. This is a perfectly valid use of social media, and hopefully Facebook will get the message. That if they charge like that… dozens of competitors will show up.
The problem is, it’s misguided. Facebook isn’t planning on charging users to post or use instant messaging on the service. It’s a farce, it’s not true at all.
But low and behold, 600,000 people fell for it….
It’s fairly amazing to see something that is completely groundless spring up to a powerhouse in terms of followers and overall presence.
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The Single Dad Dating Problem - Mapped out on Facebook
April 8, 2010
Ok people, I am having some serious problems with my current situation. Recently Divorced I mapped out on a spreadsheet using Facebook (yes I know I am a geek).
This was the process, I fired up Open Office took my exactly even 300 friends, and went though all of them. A full 292 of them are in a relationship, Married or otherwise unavailable. Below is a screen shot of the spreadsheet.
So my problem is after 5 years of being married, it completely changes and chance of recovery. When you are married you tend to hang out with other couples (at the expense of your single friends). What makes this worse is your married friends tend to hang out with THEIR married friends, leaving you with an open pool of about 8 people, which out of the 8, only 4 are of the the opposite sex, 3 of them are located over 200 miles away, and the last one doesn’t like you like that.
So there you are… and what makes matters worse, in this case social media doesn’t work because your social network is actually working against you in this case.
Enjoy the new reality.
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The next bubble…
March 29, 2010
Whilst perusing my IM contacts today… the Founder has this as his IM status at the moment…
“Looking for the next bubble”
So I IM’d him and let him know the next bubble is already upon us… the vaunted “social media” craze that currently exists (to which is readily agreed.)
My theory is built around a few undeniable facts:
1) There are shitloads of wankers, liars and bullshit artists selling themselves as “social media experts” - DANGER DANGER WILL ROBINSON!
If this is not a warning sign to all…perhaps you should recheck your prescription (optical and/or medicinal) because to become an expert should take the sane person all of a couple of hours to come up with the basics of what their potential company should be doing and why.
Most of the charlatans out there will tell you that you need to invest in a variety of platforms and this should be “organic growth” (or some other bullshit phrase or terminology that is the current word de jour.)
In the immortal words of my good friend Chuck D. of Public Enemy — “Don’t believe the hype”
Social media is just a very small sub-sect of something somewhat commonly referred to as “customer engagement” - and it is vastly more complicated than just being on Facebook, Twitter or another SN wankfest. (Most of that you can get accomplished in under a couple of hours — and with FB they offer all the analytics you need to make a ROI justification so you can do it as a self-service job if you have half a brain.)
If you have real customer engagement — well you have something both valuable & tangible — but trying to justify developing social media strategies as the lone component in the equation is like saying because you can throw a paper airplane, you should be able to guide that A-380 with 500+ passengers on-board to Tokyo next week with no problem.
I know people I have both hired & worked with a lot of people who market/sell themselves them as a “SN expert” these days…and even if they are great people and may be a excellent person to grab a beer and have a chat about the local sports team — they don’t really know shit about the anything about the scope beyond their own small world viewpoint — a world that I could teach you out of an online tutorial in under an hour.
To ask them to actually understand the needs of a multi-national corporation and the requirements that the people in the senior roles within these companies face on a daily basis — well let’s just say you are playing in the very shallow end of the business gene pool when it comes down to brass tacks.
It is the same problem that vexes the agency world these days — a lot of tosspots who know fuck all about nothing trying to sell something to clients that they apparently desperately need (if you are listening to the drivel of the tosspots that is.)
Now I can see why it is like this of course — several current digital agencies pray on their unknowing clients this way — jack them up for huge fees and inflate incredibly complex and lengthy timelines or something that if the client knew how easy it all actually was — well let’s say that the agency and client would soon be parting ways with a flurry of lawsuits soon to follow.
2) For the most part, SN destinations are built on the premise that one day they’ll make money and it is great to get in on the ground floor while the opportunity is there…
This is the Bernie Madoff scheme way of thinking… i.e. there are several large monuments to this type of theory if you happen to visit Egypt…
When is Twitter going to start making $$$ exactly? If you read the reports of Biz Stone’s unveiling of the “@anywhere” platform at SWSX a couple of weeks ago (an aside -what the fuck is that actually supposed to mean?) — well to be kind it vacillated between “floating like a lead balloon” to “re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic” — which is something like one apparently feels when Martin Sorrell speaks on any subject too…
As the Founder has mentioned here a few times before on various stories that have crossed the wires over the past few months — there are shitloads of small start-ups who rely on platforms like Twitter to build out their platform — which is like building a business on false hope if nothing else.
My current favorite is Four Square (4sq.com for the hipsters here) — or as I have dubbed it “Let me rob you of your valuable possessions while you are out making a scene somewhere…” sure “location-based services” (another phrase du jour) will someday be important….but at the moment, there is no business model that supports the bloody thing — other than making you seem like a self-important douchebag for being the “mayor” of your living room or getting a badge like you are some super-efficient boy scout…
I will go further about this (as there are several additional points one could add to validate the argument) but I’m sure you have all resorted to giving me the international “hand job” hand motion (if you have made it this far) and written me off as a cranky bastard while cueing up my “wrap it up” awards ceremony music…so I’m off to develop something sustainable for my clients… check you later…
(and I’ll try and not make it a month-plus before my next post — but can you blame me — there is only so much shit you can stand to shovel and the agency world produces way too much in proportion to its actual impact on society)
Update:
In a delicious bit of both irony & hypocrisy (and what would the ad world be without massive heaps of both) — you can sign up for my twitter ramblings (lots of swearing and bashing ensue) here:
http://twitter.com/ondownlow
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Twitter is the new MySpace
February 7, 2010
Only 17% of all Twitter accounts Twittered that month. Which is down from more than 70% in early 2007 according to George Parker.
If this pattern holds, you’ll be looking at another MySpace within a matter of 2 years. You know, the social media site that no one goes to.
This is the typical rise and fall of any social media site in recent history, Facebook most likely will be following a similar pattern, though it’s rise wasn’t as quick as twitters, so the chances are it’s fall won’t be as fast either.
Yes the law of Gravity applies here.
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Carat and Facebook surrender to Tech Crunch and Tribble
January 23, 2010
Evidently Harman’s name is back to it’s rightful owner! That’s right people, on the earlier reported today story about ad agency Carat stealing Harman’s facebook id, it appears that Carat relented under media pressure and the facebook.com/harman domain now goes to it’s proper owner, Harman Bajwa.
That doesn’t excuse the fact that ad agency Carat went to great lengths to steal his Facebook id after not settling for a free diet coke (WTF?)
This is a prime example on why you have to be careful when selecting an advertising agency, many of these ad agencies don’t understand the mechanics of social media and do more damage to a client than help.
In this case Carat ruined the name of Harman international to the point where Google News, Twitter and many other media outlets were calling them a big bully. That wasn’t helpful Carat.. not at all.
Harman International, I would strongly urge you guys on the next review to look at someone else.
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