"What amazed me the most was how Obama's 1 Million Strong Group took more than 8 months to get about 380,000 members; but Colbert's 1 Million Strong Group took less than a week to get 750,000 members," he wrote.

Colbert's Facebook Flock [NYT]

Related:
Stephen Colbert, I Love You, But It's Enough [ETP]

Rapidly rising Internet star Facebook Inc. has sold a 1.6 percent stake to Microsoft Corp. for $240 million, spurning a competing offer from online search leader Google Inc.

The deal announced Wednesday after several weeks of negotiation values Palo Alto-based Facebook at $15 billion -- less than four years after Mark Zuckerberg started the online social networking site in his Harvard University dorm room.

With the November 6 D-Day of Facebook's new advertising platform approaching, speculation is mounting as to what, exactly, the Palo Alto-based company plans to unleash on its throngs of massively indebted users. Now, a source with knowledge of the proceedings tells Radar that Mark Zuckerberg's brainchild has invited nine industry-leading companies--Condé Nast, Nike, Apple, Sony, General Motors, Coke, CBS, Chase, and Verizon--to be "Landmark Partners" in the venture, each shelling out a minimum of $300,000 for the privilege.

CondéNet has in recent months attracted new users to several of its sites while beefing up ad inventory--all on Facebook's dime.

The Web arm of magazine giant Condé Nast has been one of the more aggressive publishers in embracing Facebook's open-door policy for outside developers and is among the first to incorporate ads into a handful of viral applications on the hot social-networking site.

Web 2.0 dynamo Facebook said that an initial public offering is still years away but that it's making progress on a "financing" that some reports claim could value the start-up in the billions of dollars.

Meanwhile, the fast-growing social networking Web site, where people connect to their friends and trade information, is working on potentially important advertising technology, said founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg.

The technology would probably enable Facebook to better sell advertising on its popular site, though Zuckerberg withheld details.

Facebook will step up the policing of pornography, harassment and inappropriate behavior on its social networking site, settling a consumer fraud investigation by New York State Attorney General (AG) Andrew Cuomo.

Facebook users can now report complaints about pornography, harassment or inappropriate contact either by clicking on links on the Web site or by sending email to the abuse@facebook.com address. The company will respond to these complaints within 24 hours, and it will allow an independent examiner appointed with the approval of the New York AG, to monitor the company's compliance for the next two years.

Silicon Valley's math is getting fuzzy again.

Internet companies with funny names, little revenue and few customers are commanding high prices. And investors, having seemingly forgotten the pain of the first dot-com bust, are displaying symptoms of the disorder known as irrational exuberance.

Consider Facebook, the popular but financially unproven social network, which is reportedly being valued by investors at up to $15 billion. That is nearly half the value of Yahoo, a company with 38 times the number of employees and, based on estimates of Facebook's income, 32 times the revenue.

MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites are facing increased pressure from state law enforcement officials in the US to introduce controversial age verification technology aimed at rooting out online sexual predators.

The calls for action follow meetings between state attorneys-general and executives from MySpace and its parent company, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

The use of social networking sites by online sexual predators targeting children has become a highly politicised issue.

Hugh Grant was snapped at a St. Andrew's party in Scotland over the weekend, and British newspapers on on the trail of anyone who may have been there. American student Cecilia Hoffman posted pictures on her Facebook page of the festivities, and the snaps have been posted on blogs and in newspapers around the world.
The Daily Mail and the Mirror are opening soliciting anyone who may be able to provide details on Grant's night out to provide them with details.
From the Mirror:

Do you know the girl puckering up to Hugh or were you in the group? Call Mirror newsdesk on 020 7293 3831, we'll call straight back.

Are you one of the lovely ladies photographed with Hugh Grant? Email us at editorial@dailymailonline.co.uk

A group of white Louisiana college students dressed in blackface and reenacted the "Jena 6" assault while a friend snapped photos and videotaped the staged attack, images that were later posted to a participant's Facebook page. The photos, which you'll find on the following pages, were taken late last month on the bank of the Red River, where students from the University of Louisiana at Monroe giddily acted out the racial attack. The photos (and the short video clip at right) were posted to the Facebook page of Kristy Smith, a freshman nursing student. The album of images was entitled "The Jena 6 on the River." In the video, three students with mud smeared across their bodies stomp on a fourth student, while two of the participants are heard to say, "Jena 6." One man can also be heard saying, "Niggers put the noose on." After the video and photos on Smith's page were discovered by fellow students, she removed the material and made her Facebook page private. Smith, who did not respond to a TSG e-mail sent to her school address, apologized for the images in several recent Facebook postings.

Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft chief executive, believes that the craze for individual social networks such as Facebook risks being exposed as a "fad", an admission that places questions over the software giant's mooted interest in the website.

"I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there's a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people," Mr Ballmer told Times Online yesterday.

The remarks follow reports last week that the Microsoft boss, who has committed himself to stir up Microsoft's lacklustre share price by extending the group's online presence, is weighing up taking a stake in Facebook that could value the social networking site at $10 billion (£5 billion).

It hasn't happened yet, nor is there a timeline for it, but Facebook has stated that it's working on allowing its members to "organize that long list of friends into groups so you can decide more specifically who sees what." No formal announcement was made, but you can see the little tidbit--along with something about forthcoming "daily digest" e-mail options--on the What's New on Facebook page. It looks like TechCrunch was the first to spot this.

"Friend grouping" is a move that, unless the company really screws it up, Facebook members are very likely to applaud.

Technically speaking, it's hardly revolutionary. The Six Apart-owned blogging pioneer LiveJournal, for example, has allowed the simple creation of "custom friend groups" for years. But what you have to understand about Facebook is that millions of young "early adopters" signed up with the (not particularly forward-thinking) expectation that the only people who'd be seeing their profiles were their college friends and other contemporaries.

Some people laughed at Mark E. Zuckerberg when he reportedly turned down a $900 million offer last year for Facebook, the social networking Web site he founded three-and-a-half years ago. But Microsoft is considering an investment in the fast-growing site, according to a person familiar with ongoing talks between the companies, that gives the start-up a value of as much as $10 billion.

The discussions between Microsoft and Facebook were first reported Monday on the Web site of The Wall Street Journal. The newspaper said that Microsoft is considering an investment of $300 million to $500 million for less than 5 percent of the company.

The New York Attorney General has subpoenaed Facebook after the company did not respond to "many" complaints by investigators who were solicited for sex while posing as teenagers on the social-networking site.

State investigators, who set up profiles as 12- to 14-year olds, said they were quickly contacted by other Facebook users with comments such as "u look too hot....... can i c u online," "do you like sex?" and "call me if u want to do sex with me."

Investigators said that when they wrote to Facebook about their experiences, the concerns were ignored "many" times.

Having a huge network of online buddies does not mean you have any more close friends than the rest of us, a British researcher said on Monday.

Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are changing the nature of how people connect by making it easy to collect hundreds of friends and acquaintances online.

"Our data suggests weak ties are (more common) but there is no difference in the number of close friends people have," said Will Reader, an evolutionary psychologist at Sheffield Hallam University.

Jean Baudrillard, as any philosophy student will tell you, theorized that, in the postmodern world, "the territory no longer precedes the map." In other words, if you are a member of N.Y.U.'s class of 2011, you probably arrived in New York City with a preëxisting web of soon-to-be college friends from Facebook, the online social-networking site. You know which of them count "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" among their favorite movies, which are interested in punk rock or organic food, and which belong to such groups as "My Pimpin' Is Immaculate, Hard Like Calculus!" and "I Went to a Public High School . . . Bitch." You and your friends may or may not have actually met.

The peril in getting to know classmates on the computer is that incoming undergraduates may forget how to do so in real life. That was the thinking behind "Facebook in the Flesh," a seminar held during N.Y.U.'s freshman orientation. "Meeting new people face-to-face can be . . . intimidating," a brochure read. "This fun, interactive workshop will get everyone talking as we build social networks in person." The session took place at the Kimmel Center--it was scheduled at the same time as "Dude, Where's My Class?"--and drew about thirty-five students, who spent the initial minutes sitting side by side in uncomfortable silence. Eventually, two girls struck up a conversation and realized, to their delight, that they were both from Long Island. ("Suffolk County?" "Me, too!")

You've been hearing a lot about Facebook lately. Not, mercifully, in the "there's this crazy social-networking thing the kids are doing" sense. Rather in the "oh my God, you've got to get on it, too" sense.

One year after taking down its "students only" shingle, Facebook is indeed huge with a subset of the professional, grownup world. Bully for all the forty- and fiftysomethings hopping on the (groaning and overloaded) social-networking bandwagon. And bully for Facebook, which has gotten months of coverage and word-of-mouth advertising from its newfound status as the social network a well-scrubbed, middle-aged guy in a suit can participate in without seeming creepy.