Author: Josh Wolford

Did you know that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg could have been the CEO at another huge social networking company? Probably not. But apparently she reveals that story and more in her upcoming book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead.

Tom Gara at The Wall Street Journal got an advance copy of the book and posted his thoughts late Tuesday. Since then, he’s been pulling out some interesting anecdotes about her time at Google, relationship with Mark Zuckerberg, and more.

One little nugget comes in the form of a declined job offer from 2006.

Apparently, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman approached Sandberg and asked her to be the CEO of his company.

Here’s a direct quote from the book:

“In the summer of 2006, a tiny start-up called LinkedIn was looking for a new CEO, and Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s founder, reached out to me. I thought it was a great opportunity, and after five years in the same position at Google I was ready for a new challenge. But the timing was tricky. I was thirty-seven years old and wanted to have a second child. I told Reid the truth: regrettably, I had to pass…”

Of course, LinkedIn would go on to hit 200 million members by the end of 2012.

I think it’s safe to say that Sandberg did well for herself at the company she eventually chose, which has also become pretty successful over the past six years.

Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead is due out on March 11th.

Facebook has just announced Developers Live, a new destination (in the form of a Facebook app) that allows developers to keep up with all of the latest news.

Facebook says that it will be “central place to learn about the latest tools and to get access to the product managers and engineers who created them.”

Developers Live will also feature tutorials and other speaking sessions – both live and recorded. There will also be interactive broadcasts at some point down the line.

Here’s more on what Facebook will offer on the new video channel:

• Mobile developers will learn how to go deeper and grow their apps with Facebook
• Game developers will learn how to build better games across web and mobile
• Websites and publishers will learn how to use Facebook to drive traffic

The new video channel was announced on Facebook’s Developer Blog, which up until now has been to premier destination for developers to learn about the happenings in Facebook land. You can head on over to the Developers Live app today, but there doesn’t seem to be anything there yet.

The first live event will take place on February 19th and will feature Director of Product Doug Purdy. You can register for that event here.

Twitter has just announced some search and discovery updates to their iOS and Android apps as well as mobile.twitter.com that they say will help users “better find what’s most important to you when you’re on the go.”

What they’ve done is tweaked their discovery and search functions to provide a single steam of information – tweets, users, activity, trends. According to Twitter, it will all be in one place now.

The Discover tab now aggregates all kinds of activity into one stream on both iOS and Android. Twitter has also added the ability to access activity and trends from the top of the Discover tab.

Search has been updated in a similar fashion:

“Search results now surface the most relevant mix of Tweets, photos, and accounts, all in one stream (similar to the stream in Discover). We’ve also added a new search button to Twitter for iPhone, letting you search from anywhere within the app. (This button was already available in the Android and iPad apps.) Look for the magnifying glass icon next to the button you use to compose a Tweet,” says Twitter.

Twitter has also updated the @connect tab, which now defaults to showing all types of interactions. You can go into your settings and set the default to simply show @mentions if that’s what you want.

Also, they changed the way the apps manage links to outside sites. If you click on a URL inside a tweet, you now go directly to the site no matter where you are in the Twitter app. Before, you would have to tap the tweet as a whole, go to and expanded view, and then click on the outside link to be directed out.

Twitter says that the updates should be available in both the App Store and Google Play, but as of the writing of this article neither seem to be available yet. We’ll let you know when they drop.

You can say a lot of things and stand behind First Amendment protections. Saying that you’re going to kill the President on Facebook is not one of those things, according to a Florida jury.

A Florida man has been convicted of making death threats against President Obama and is now awaiting sentencing scheduled for April.

According to the court, Christopher Castillo posted the threats to his Facebook page in November, just days before Obama was reelected for a second term. The posts reportedly said that he if reelected, he would hunt down and kill the President. Castillo also added that he would “watch the life disappear from his eyes.”

According to the Secret Service, they visited Castillo shortly after learning of the threat from a citizen. He reportedly admitted to posting the Facebook statuses.

“(Castillo) was given every opportunity to back down and say it was a joke and he never (backed down),” said Assistant U.S. attorney Shawn Napier. “It wasn’t sarcasm. It was a threat to kill the president.”

Castillo’s attorney argued that the man who notified the Secret Service of the posts was a noted internet troll who had provoked the comments from Castillo, and that Castillo simply said some things he didn’t mean. He also argued that the comments should be protected as “political discussion” under the First Amendment.

A jury disagreed.

As this case and many others prove, things you say on Facebook hold just as much weight as things you would scream out front of the White House. Don’t threaten to kill the President, and especially don’t do it on a public forum like Twitter or Facebook.

[Orlando Sentinel via NY Daily News]

Apple has just announced a pretty significant milestone: 25 billion songs have been purchased and downloaded from iTunes.

According to Apple, the 25 billionth song was “Monkey Drums” (Goksel Vancin Remix) by Chase Buch, and was downloaded by a guy named Phillip Lüpke from Germany. For this distinctive honor, Lüpke will receive an iTunes gift card worth €10,000.

This isn’t the first time Apple has given out a big prize when they hit a milestone. Back in March of 2012, Apple’s App Store hit 25 billion downloads and the company gave a Chinese man a $10,000 iTunes gift card.

“We are grateful to our users whose passion for music over the past 10 years has made iTunes the number one music retailer in the world,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “Averaging over 15,000 songs downloaded per minute, the iTunes Store connects music fans with their favorite artists, including global sensations like Adele and Coldplay and new artists like The Lumineers, on a scale we never imagined possible.”

The iTunes catalog features over 26 million songs and is available in 119 countries.

With Facebook comes stupid Facebook hoaxes – it’s inevitable. There are over 1 billion monthly active users on the social network, and a sample size that large is bound to include plenty of twits. No, you’re not going to win a share of this dude’s lottery prize if you share his photo. You’re also not going to help save this baby born with its heart on the outside if you like a page. Get it together, people.

But a new hoax making the rounds may just be the dumbest thing to hit the Facebook community in quite some time – maybe ever.

The viral status suggests that at the end of February, Facebook will be shutting down for three whole days for some sort of site maintenance.

According to Sophos Naked Security blog, the hoax first appeared in French and has morphed into English.

Here’s what the message looks like (or at least some form of this):

WARNING!! Facebook will be closed for maintenance from February 29th to 31st!! Facebook wants YOU to Share this message with at least 15 of your friends for the best chance of alerting everyone. Many people will try to log in from February 29 to 31, just to find the site closed down for those days with no warning

Facebook has never and will never go down for three days of site maintenance. Plus, Facebook definitely won’t go down from February 29th to February 31st because those dates don’t exist.

In 2013, February ends on the 28th. In a few years there will be a February 29th, but there will never, ever be a February 30th or 31st (at least in our modern calendar).

Use your noggins and stop spreading this stuff. Pretty please?

If the government refuses to help us defend against impending threats, the people have no choice but to take up the project themselves. And since the White House has officially thrown water on the people’s demands to build our very own Death Star, it means that we have to turn to crowdfunding.

Over 500 people have pledged over £70,000 to help kickstart the construction of a functioning Death Star on Kickstarter. I’m sure you caught the “£” – that’s because the Kickstarter project was actually started out of Leicestershire, United Kingdom. Kickstarter only went live for U.K.-based projects back in October, 2012.

Last month, a petition to start building a Death Star on the White House’s “We The People” site garnered enough signatures to force an official response from the government. The carefully-worded response suggested that “the Administration does not support blowing up planets,” and that the project would be economically unfeasible anyway.

Some estimates have given such a project an $850,000,000,000,000,000 (£543,000,000,000,000,00) price tag, but the new Kickstarter project is only asking for £20 million at this point, in order to develop “more detailed plans and enough chicken wire to protect reactor exhaust ports.”

The project creators, gnut.co.uk, acknowledge that it’s all a joke and that the goal is set high to ensure it is never actually fulfilled:

“The main challenge is assuring Kickstarter that this is a joke and not a serious project. As proof, the goal has been set high enough to make successful funding almost impossible.”

That’s probably why 500+ backers over the past 48 hours have felt safe in making pledges.

Still, you have until April 1st (fittingly) to make your pledge and help reach the £20,000,000 goal. Wouldn’t that be hilarious, if this thing was actually funded?

Back in January the classic board game and cause of everyone’s very first rage quit, Monopoly, decided that they were going to give one of the classic game pieces the boot (it’s not the boot). In order to do that, they set up a Facebook app and asked people to vote on which piece they wanted to keep.

Today, the results are in and it’s not good news for the iron. According to your votes, it was a close race for the bottom spot between the iron, the wheelbarrow, and the boot. But in the end the iron is the piece that will be “locked up forever.”

Part of this Facebook promotion also involved the selection of a new piece to replace the old one (a robot, diamond ring, cat, helicopter, and guitar). Monopoly has yet to reveal that pic, although users on the game’s page seem to believe that it will be the cat.

Twitter’s six-second video-sharing app Vine launched with a bit of a porn problem. Vine scurried around and quickly turned the porn problem into a much lesser porn problem by banning many porn-related searches and hiding NSFW material behind warning screens.

Today, they launched an update to the app that carries a new 17+ rating in the App Store. Short of banning nudity, Vine has done pretty much all they can to make pornography as inaccessible to the wrong kind of eyes as they can.

Anyway, Jon Stewart finally got around to addressing the porn issue. Watch the whole thing for some bonus jabs at Facebook.

Twitter’s six-second video app that used to (and kind of still does) have a porn problem has just seen its age rating jump from 12+ to 17+.

Now, iOS users must be at least 17 years old to download the app – a change that came along with the new version 1.0.5., which just launched on Wednesday. The update gives users the ability to share Vines to Twitter and Facebook after posting and also ships various bug fixes. Although the age rating jump isn’t mentioned in the update text, users will see the age-restricted warning box pop up when they attempt to download the app.

Vine was found to have a porn problem pretty much as soon as it launched. That problem was exacerbated when a very NSFW six-second clip somehow made its way into the “Editors Pick” section of the explore page.

That was quickly remedied, but the fact that porn was easily accessible on the app remained. In order to help keep pornographic imagery off of the eyes of youngsters, Vine began to censor porn-related hashtag searches like #porn, #nsfw, and #boobs.

As of now, porn is still able to be found on Vine, as the app guidelines don’t ban it outright. It is a lot harder to find than it was surrounding launch, however. Plus, many NSFW videos are hidden behind a warning screen that users must tap through in order to reveal the video.

Last week another controversial photo app, 500px, was restored with a 17+ age rating after Apple previously yanked it for pornographic content.

Democratic activist and same-sex marriage proponent Sean Eldridge has just filed forms with the Federal Elections Commission announcing his intent to run for Congress. Eldridge, who will run for the House of Representatives as a Democrat, has a major Facebook connection.

In fact, he’s married to Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.

Hughes and Eldridge married last July in a ceremony attended by other Facebook notables Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker. It was also attended by some members of Congress, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Eldridge is the President of Hudson River Ventures, a small investment firm, and is a senior advisor at the Freedom to Marry campaign. In 2012, he served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

He would be seeking New York’s 19th District, which lies north of NYC and south of the capital, Albany. Its seat is currently held by Republican Chris Gibson, a retired Army Colonel who won reelection in 2012 by a six point percent margin. However, the district has voted for President Obama twice now – the latest in 2012 by a six point margin (52 to 46 over Mitt Romney).

[via Bloomberg]

Match.com has just put out their third-annual “Singles in America” study and it contains some pretty interesting information on how people are using social media and the internet in their dating/sex lives.

Probably the most telling piece of data collected in the study is that nearly half (48%) of all women surveyed do some Facebook digging on their date partner before the date begins. Only 38% of men copped to doing pre-date Facebook research and 49% said that the practice was “unacceptable.”

Women are also more likely to be turned off by what they find. 49% said they would cancel a date based solely on information unearthed by their Facebook research. Only 27% of men said that they would cancel.

Both women and men are aware of the need to “clean up” their Facebook profiles in order to put their best online foot forward (26% and 27%, respectively).

Other interesting stats from the study:

• Over half of single men (57%) and 45% of single women have received a sext (sexy photo or explicit text), and 23% of these singles have shared them with others. Of that 23%, a whopping 42% of men and 28% of women said they shared the sext with three or more people
• 42% of single men reported they would not be offended if a recipient shared their sext with others, vs. 13% of women.
• 77% of women would not date someone who was secretive with their texts vs. 53% of men.

Hey, it’s another video of a cute baby dancing cutely to Gangnam Style. Although the Gangnam Style craze has died down and we’re all hesitant to listen to the PSY hit (lest we get the wretched thing stuck in our heads again) – this is just too good to ignore.

It wouldn’t really matter what song awoke our slumbering tot. It’s not Gangnam Style that makes this worthy of a watch. It’s her surprise and elation. It’s also her sister’s reaction.

I must stop before I get too gushy over all the cute. What is happening to me?

[sat ireland via reddit]

Microsoft has just announced that Redbox Instant, the company’s streaming video venture with Verizon, will be coming to the Xbox 360 as as console exclusive.

“Today we’re happy to reveal that Redbox Instant by Verizon will be coming to Xbox 360 in the very near future,” says the Major Nelson blog. No other details were provided on the exact launch date of the new app, simply the “very near future.”

Also adding to a vagueness is the phrase “coming days,” which is the time frame in which current Redbox Instant beta participants will receive an email with a special access code. Redbox Instant is currently in a beta testing phase, but is likely to open up to everyone by March.

As is the case with Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu, and most other Xbox apps, an Xbox LIVE Gold membership will be required to use the new Redbox Instant app. Redbox Instant itself costs $8 a month ($9 for Blu-ray), and that includes full streaming access as well as four additional physical rentals.

Score one for Microsoft as they’ve just landed another streaming video option to tempt users into paying for Xbox LIVE Gold – even if Redbox Instant’s current offerings leave a lot to be desired.

After taking baby steps for the past year, Instagram has finally realized its potential as a real website. The company has just launched web feeds for all users, which means that interacting with Instagram on the web produces nearly the same experience as interacting with Instagram on the mobile app.

Almost. But we’ll get back to that.

The Facebook-owned photo-sharing social network has been around for over two years and amassed over 90 million monthly active users. And today marks the first time that users can browse their feeds on the web.

Instagram, who has admittedly thrown all of their focus into mobile, took the first step into building a passable web presence last June when they launched comments and likes on individual photo pages on the web. Before that, viewing an Instagram photo via a link on a Twitter or Facebook post was simply that – viewing the photo. That was the only web presence that Instagram maintained. Adding comments and likes to the web photo pages allowed users to interact with the network on a very basic level.

Then, in November, Instagram launched profiles on the web, giving users the ability to browse individual users’ photos. Once again, a baby step toward a true web presence.

Today, Instagram on the web gets a news feed – one that mimics the mobile experience.

“Your Instagram Feed on the web functions much like it does on your mobile phone. You can browse through the latest photos of people whom you follow with updates as people post new photos. Like photos by double clicking on them or pressing the like button. Or, engage in a conversation around a photo with inline commenting. Browse through pages of the most recent images to keep up on what’s happening with the people you follow in realtime. And shrink your browser down to a single column for your feed to look more like your mobile feed. Simply put, we’ve brought a simple, powerful, and beautiful Instagram browsing experience to the web,” says Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom.

You can click on @users to view their profiles. It doesn’t look like hashtags are clickable yet – but other than that everything else feels like the mobile app.

As it stands, the web experience is 75% or so of the mobile experience. The only thing still missing is the ability to upload and tool photos from the web. As much as you may want that ability, you shouldn’t hold your breath. According to Instagram, that wouldn’t really fit the company’s overall mission:

“We do not offer the ability to upload from the web as Instagram is about producing photos on the go, in the real world, in realtime. On the other hand, Instagram for the web is focused on making the browsing experience a fast, simple and enjoyable one,” says Systrom.

Even so, Instagram has finally grown up and they have an actual website to prove it.

If you’re a beer-lover who thinks that it’s important to drink certain styles of beer in certain styles of glasses, this new product from two major American breweries may interest you.

Purveyors of tasty brews Dogfish Head Brewery and Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. have teamed up with Spiegelau glassware to create the ultimate glass for India Pale Ale lovers. They call it the “new standard for IPA glassware.”

“I’ve been a longtime believer in the importance of using quality glassware to enhance the enjoyment of quality craft beer,” says Dogfish Head Founder and President Sam Calagione. “The process of collaborating on the design of this hop-centric glass takes this concept to the next level.”

Why does this glass make the IPA-drinking experience better? According to its designers, a whole bunch of things. For instance the glass’ walls are thin and rounded, allowing proper temperature regulation. The shape also helps to “amplify hop aromas,” something that any IPA drinker will know is important.

The glass also has “wave-like ridges to aerate beer on its way in and out of the glass” and “a laser-etched logo on the bottom of the bowl to sustain carbonation and head.”

Spiegelau VP Matthew Rutkowski believes that If pilsners, saisons, and other styles of beer have universally-recognized glasses that maximize flavor and regulate consistency, why not the IPA?

“The goal of this initiative was to develop a glass that would serve as the new global standard for the American IPA style of beer, just as the world recognizes wheat, pilsner and other beer glass styles,” Rutkowski says. “We are thrilled to have collaborated with two of America’s pre-eminent IPA brewers on this project, as this further validates that we are offering beer drinkers a glass that will maximize their tasting experience to its fullest potential.”

You can order one of the new IPA glasses from the Dogfish Head store. It’ll run you $9. Even if you think the whole “glass matters” thing is bullsh*t, it’s still a pretty cool glass.

Man, I’m thirsty.

[Dogfish Head Brewery]

Whether you liked it or not, Dodge’s Super Bowl ad “So God Made a Farmer” made a big splash. Whether it will help the company sell more Ram pickup trucks is still left to be seen.

This parody ad, though funny, will probably not do much to further popularize FarmVille. That’s probably a good thing.

If there is a God, I can’t imagine that he would have made FarmVille.

[Whatstrending via Fark]

Guys: get off reddit. Seriously. And stop watching House of Cards. I know it’s all there at once – all 13 episodes! But go take the dog for a walk. For the love of your sperm.

We all know by now that research has linked sedentary lifestyles to not living very long. Seriously, the more you sit on your ass, the likelier you are to develop a host of illnesses and eventually die. Naturally, that’s bad news for millions of people whose jobs involve sitting in front of a computer all day.

Now, according to new research, it looks like your internet-browsing, tv-watching overindulgence may also be hurting your chances of reproducing.

The study, recently published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, involved 189 men, various level of inactivity, and sperm samples. What the researchers found was that sedentary lifestyles were associated with lower sperm counts.

“The objective of this study was to evaluate the relationships between semen quality and both physical activity and TV watching among young, healthy men. We hypothesised that increased physical activity was associated with higher sperm count, concentration and motility, and a lower proportion of morphologically abnormal sperm. Furthermore, we hypothesised that increased TV watching time was associated with decreased semen quality parameters,” said the study’s authors.

And they were right. Young me who spent over 20 hours a week watching television had a 44% lower sperm count that those men who watched the least amount of TV (4 hours). Although the researchers say that lower sperm count doesn’t necessarily affect reproductive chances – the fact is that sitting on the couch is reducing your swimmers.

There is some hope, if you’re willing to turn off Netflix and stay off reddit for a little bit. The study also concluded that exercise helped overall sperm count. In fact, men who logged at least 15 hours of moderate exercise a week had 73% higher sperm counts as compared to men who didn’t log any physical activity.

Light physical activity, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have an impact on sperm count.

[Medical News Today via Geekosystem]

Facebook is cleaning up Open Graph actions in order to make the user experience less spammy and more uniform across the site.

First announced back in October 2012, Facebook says they will begin to implement the new Open Graph action guidelines on Wednesday, February 6th.

“Starting today, custom actions that automatically publish back to Facebook as a person consumes content in your app will no longer be approved. We will only allow apps that use our built-in actions to automatically publish stories as content is consumed. With built-in actions, we understand the structure of the information and can ensure a better user experience by specializing story formats that can help set user expectations,” said Facebook back in October.

Those “built-in” actions include “like,” “follow,” “listen,” “read,” and “watch.”

Basically, Facebook wants to provide a consistent user experience, and allowing apps to publish stories that use actions like “view” and other custom actions doesn’t fall in line with that goal. So if your app publishes custom actions every time someone simply consumes content, you need to switch over to a Facebook-approved “built-in” action.

Here’s what Facebook had to say in a developer note:

We will no longer show Custom Open Graph actions that were published simply by a user consuming content. If you own one of these actions and it was previously approved, you will have received an email from us. Developers should stop publishing these actions as doing so will return an error starting February 6th.

So users’ news feeds and tickers will still be populated with plenty of Open Graph actions, but decidedly less than before. Users will no longer see confusing custom actions, which will make feeds seem less spammy and more useful.

[h/t All Things D]

So, the Grammys are this Sunday, and Spotify thinks they can predict who the winners will be.

Well, not exactly. But what they have done is analyze song and album streams to determine which of the current nominees would win the Grammy if Grammys were decided by popularity on the popular streaming service.

Without further ado, here are Spotify’s picks:

For Record of the Year, Spotify chooses Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” over The Black Keys, Kelly Clarkson, Fun, Frank Ocean, and Taylor Swift. They also pick this song for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance.

For Album of the Year, Spotify says that users would pick Mumford & Sons’ Babel over Jack White’s Blunderbuss, Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, Fun’s Some Nights, and The Black Keys’ El Camino.

For Best New Artist, Spotify users choose The Lumineers over Frank Ocean, Hunter Hayes, Fun, and Alabama Shakes.

And for Best Pop Solo Performance, Carly Rae Jespen’s viral smash “Call Me Maybe” wins with Spotify users.

Spotify has also just launched a Predict the Grammys Facebook app, which offers users the chance to win tickets to next year’s Grammys as well as free Spotify premium service.