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The Day Facebook Turned Down $1 Billion (Inc.)

Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and contrarian thinker, told the story of the day Mark Zuckerberg decided to turn down Yahoo's $1 billion offer to buy Facebook. "The most important moment in my mind in the history of Facebook occurred in July 2006," he began. At the time, Facebook was just two years old. "And we received an acquisition offer from Yahoo for $1 billion." At the time, Mark Zuckerberg was 22 years old. Thiel said he remembered saying, "We should probably talk about this. A billion dollars is a lot of money." They hashed out the conversation. Thiel said he and Jim Breyer pointed out: "You own 25 percent. There's so much you could do with the money." Thiel recalled Zuckerberg said, in a nutshell: "I don't know what I could do with the money. I'd just start another social networking site. I kind of like the one I already have." Read >>

Pinterest Is Showing Off Analytics (Wired)

Pinterest launched an analytics system to measure how much interest and traffic the red-hot scrapbooking network is sending to other websites. Pinterest is driving loads of traffic, and money. By showing other sites just how valuable it is to them, Pinterest is wisely laying the groundwork to sell advertising.

The “Pinterest Web Analytics” product provides a very modest amount of data, showing owners of other websites how many people have pinned to Pinterest from their site, how many people saw those pins, and how many people clicked out from Pinterest to their site. In addition, site owners will get to see which items on their site have been pinned most frequently and most recently. Read >>

Apple Social Networking Patent Would Allow You To Track Your Stalkers (iDB)

Apple wants to get into social networking, but not as a rival to Facebook or Twitter. Instead, the iPhone maker envisions a way to better protect mobile users against spammers and stalkers. Tuesday, the United States Patent and Trademark Office approved a 2010 application for a friend service of sorts which could underlie current social networks.

The patent titled "Apparatus and method for efficiently managing data in a social networking service," describes methods for maintaining three databases: one to oversee friends within a network, another to store handles for out-of-network contacts, and a third to log changes. Among the potential advantages: preventing a flood of friend requests and ignoring contact attempts by stalkers. Read >>

Social Collaboration Can Help Address Work From Home Issues (Simpler Media Group via CMSWire)

Ever since Marissa Mayer declared “Work From Home” dead at Yahoo, many other companies have begun to take a closer look at the impact that “Work From Home” is having. Like most social business issues, culture dictates how well employees will engage online as they do within a company’s four walls. This is a Yahoo problem, not a work from home issue.

If employees are given the right tools through which they can track their progress, manage projects and share ideas and feedback, it will be easy for managers and directors to know what their employees are working on. Read >>

Over 2 Percent Of Twitter Posts Come From Jakarta (TechInAsia)

Brand24, an Indonesian company that monitors social marketing online, has come out with this interesting new infographic about Indonesia’s online socializing. It shows how the country has taken to sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube in huge numbers. The infographic shows Jakarta is very social, ranked second in terms of the world’s top cities on Facebook (Bangkok is first). When it comes to Twitter, Jakarta alone contributed about 2.4 percent of the 10.6 billion Twitter posts made worldwide from January to March this year. Tokyo came close, creating 2.3 percent of all tweets. Indonesia as a whole has 29 million Twitter users. Read >>

What Is Visual Social Media Marketing? (Boot Camp Digital via Mediabistro)

Visual social media marketing is the practice of using video, images and other visual content (like infographics) to help your messages stand out from the noise and clutter to more effectively reach your audience. This infographic takes a closer look at why visual marketing is one of the biggest trends in social media. Read >>