03-08-2012 19:54 Swimming the final individual race of his remarkable career, Michael Phelps came from behind to win the 100-meter butterfly for his third gold medal of the London Games. Teens Katie Ledecky and Missy Franklin also won gold. (Aug. 3)
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Phelps, Ledecky, Franklin All Golden at Olympics - Video
02-08-2012 12:01 Kayla Harrison made history by winning the women's 78-kilogram Olympic judo gold medal on Thursday, the United States' first-ever gold in the sport. (Aug. 2)
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Kayla Harrison Wins First-ever US Judo Gold - Video
Social media, until recently the hottest sector in Silicon Valley, is now getting the cold shoulder from investors, downgrades from analysts and criticism from some fans.
But while the hype around social networking companies has deflated, the industry is no where near a bust, experts say. Unlike the dot-com bubble more than a decade ago, when companies with no profits and scant revenues saw soaring valuations, many social media companies are pulling in millions in revenues as they change the way people work, play and communicate.
"The reality is, they are going through amazing growing pains," said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies.
Many social media companies burst onto the Internet as culture-changing enterprises Now, though, some are being hammered by Wall Street.
Investors are dismayed with Facebook and Zynga. Twitter, meanwhile, triggered a public relations disaster when it shut down a British journalist's account after he criticized Twitter's Olympic partner, NBC -- and then reversed itself. And some advertisers are skeptical that social networks are the right platform for their ads.
Still, most analysts say the future is far from gloomy.
"They are still innovating at Facebook," said Kevin Lee, co-founder of Didit, an online
Nonetheless, investors are on edge. Facebook's market value has collapsed to about half of the record $104 billion valuation the company set when it began selling shares in May. "The jury is in: Facebook is not and will not be a second Google (GOOG)," IDC analyst Karsten Weide wrote after the company reported its first quarterly earnings last week that revealed its revenue slowing.
Social network companies Zynga, Pandora and Groupon also are trading far below their initial public offering price.
Both San Francisco-based online game company Zynga and Facebook have also been hit with lawsuits from investors. In Zynga's case, executives and early investors are accused of knowing the company was struggling when they sold millions of shares before announcing a substantial drop in projected earnings. Facebook and its banking partners have been targeted by lawsuits accusing them of misleading investors by failing to share information passed on to select Wall Street analysts that warned of less-than-rosy financial results for its first quarter as a public company.
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Social media, until recently a hot sector, faces growing skeptics
The social-networking giant has hundreds of developers pushing new code to the service every week.
Facebook announced today it is doubling the site's release speed to shipping new code twice per day. The push is driven by Facebook's New York office as well as the social network's daily push already managed by its California release engineering team.
As Facebook grows towards 1 billion monthly active users and beyond, maintaining and frequently improving the site is a must. The company's hacker mentality of "move fast and break things" definitely applies here.
"We're making this change to keep our release process as quick and efficient at 1,000 engineers as it was at 100," release engineering manager Chuck Rossi said in a statement. "I'm really looking forward to this change as it takes our already incredibly aggressive release process and doubles down on it, offering us twice the opportunity to ship great things. It's exciting and I think it crushes what anyone else of our size and impact is doing. Ship early and ship twice as often."
Facebook started pushing code once a day back in May 2011. Rossi says Facebook developers are now producing six times the amount of code per week as they were in January 2008, when he left Google for the social networking giant.
Facebook may be fast at updating its main Web site, but the same definitely cannot be said for its mobile division. The social-networking giant needs to significantly improve its apps for Android and iOS if it wants to "crush what anyone else its size and impact is doing" in mobile.
02-08-2012 16:42 'Battlestar Galactica' actress Katee Sackhoff is back on TV with the new show 'Longmire' on A&E. It's a hit on the network and has already been picked up for a second season. Sackhoff attributes part of its success to her 'Battlestar' fans. (Aug. 2)
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Katee Sackhoff Returns to TV in 'Longmire' - Video