the social network

Reports began to surface on Monday indicating that Facebook was looking to get over its post-IPO blues by snapping up the Israeli-based company that matches faces in digital photographs to the names of existing friends.

Facebook's IPO has focused yet another spotlight on its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. But beyond the hoopla, there's another, quieter story to be found in the wunderkind CEO -- the lessons that can be gleaned from his life.

On Thursday, Facebook finally filed for its IPO. As the site that made it possible for you to reconnect with your third-grade girlfriend moves into the next phase of its life, we decided to look back at some of the high points in Facebook's brief but captivating history.

Facebook may finally be ready to go public in the second quarter of 2012. At an estimated valuation of $100 billion, the social networking giant is probably no longer a ground-floor opportunity -- but could even that number be too low?

The Netflix Goliath was seriously weakened this week when Starz said it will pull its content from the company's streaming feed in February: Is it time for the industry Davids such as Redbox, Blockbuster and Amazon to pull out their slingshots?

Sony's quarterly profit dropped 8.6% as a strong yen and falling TV prices erased the boost the Japanese electronics and entertainment company got from its hit movie "The Social Network."

The new movie about Mark Zuckerberg and the launching of Facebook racked up $23 million in its first weekend. Hardly a record, but considering the flick spotlights a geek who started a website, it's not too shabby.

A four-hour Facebook outage -- the worst in more than four years for the company -- caused plenty of commotion among users whose access was blocked or slowed Thursday. The trouble came only two days after a hacker attacked Twitter with pop-up windows.

Facebook, the hugely popular and controversial social network, will likely announce this week that it has reached a half-billion users. To mark the occasion, it's launching a celebration of its users. But a not-so-flattering movie will also soon be out.

Leave it to Hollywood to portray a college-age computer geek as a Hannibal Lecter type. But that seems to be how the newly released trailer for The Social Network, which tells the story of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, plays it.