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The intense pressure to convert Twitter into a profitable business, and before a tech bubble pops, is palpable here. And it’s happening as the company struggles with an interlocked set of existential questions, starting with the most basic one possible: What is Twitter? Initially, the idea was of a kind of adrenalized Facebook, with friends […]

A day after he deleted his Facebook account last month, Terry Braye — exiled public school teacher — called SF Weekly in a panic. “I’m in trouble,” he said. “They may arrest me.” It wouldn’t be the first time. More than a year earlier, the 61-year-old music instructor had been arrested for accusations that he’d […]

Jaron Lanier has become the go-to pundit for people lamenting the social changes wrought by modern technology. Last year, he published “You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto,” a provocative critique of digital technologies, including Wikipedia (which he called a triumph of “intellectual mob rule”) and social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, which he has […]

It is certainly no accident that the post-idea world has sprung up alongside the social networking world. Even though there are sites and blogs dedicated to ideas, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, etc., the most popular sites on the Web, are basically information exchanges, designed to feed the insatiable information hunger, though this is hardly the […]

Three years of waiting. Everywhere around us there are waves of bouncing sons, bounties of daughters, stroller wheels creaking under the cheerful load. Facebook updates, email messages, and Christmas cards arrive with pictures of tots, their faces smeared with avocado or cake frosting. Babies on rugs, babies in hats. Invitations to baby showers with cursive […]

In February 2009, with the threat of Facebook’s growing popularity looming over their company, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, the co-founders of Myspace, appeared on The Charlie Rose Show. DeWolfe explained that Myspace was more than a social network; it was a portal where people discovered new friends and music and movies—it was practically where […]

On Monday, May 2, a year and a day after Shannan disappeared, Mari Gilbert and four other women came together in Manhattan to meet, at my invitation. Until that day, the five women had been in touch only through Facebook or by phone; just two of the five had seen one another in person. In […]

“There are compromises on not being in China, and there are compromises on being in China. It’s not clear to me which one is bigger,” she says. Three people familiar with these internal deliberations say that Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg fundamentally disagree on the issue. Zuckerberg believes that Facebook can be an agent of change […]

Vince Thompson doesn’t appear in any accounts of Facebook’s early years. Few of the more than 2,000 employees at the company even know his name. The AOL veteran’s brief stint as Facebook’s first official ad-sales chief lasted less than six months. Even so, when Thompson left the company in early 2006, he exercised his options […]

After a couple years at Facebook, Jeff Hammerbacher grew restless. He figured that much of the groundbreaking computer science had been done. Something else gnawed at him. Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google, and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. “The best minds of my generation are thinking […]