FacebookPrivacy

This Friday, Facebook will go public in one of the most anticipated IPOs in history. With more than 900 million users, Mark Zuckerberg's expanding social media empire has become a seemingly irreplaceable part of the online experience. Unfortunately, a byproduct of its success is that millions of...

We all heard that employers are checking out the Facebook pages of prospective hires. High schoolers and their parents need to know that the folks who hand out scholarships are checking social media sites too.

In an attempt to crack down on spam, Facebook has shut down a number of third-party software applications in the past week. The move could signal that the world's most popular social network plans maintain righter control over the apps that run on its site.

Forecasting which technologies will succeed is always hazardous, but it proved especially difficult in 2010, a year full of surprises -- and also several disappointments. Facebook blew away even the most optimistic expectations for the year. Google Buzz? Not so much.

Facebook launched its Places geo-location service just Wednesday night. But the Center for Digital Democracy already plans to raise privacy issues about the service with Federal Trade Commission officials this week.