Classroom training isn’t dead, but it also isn’t the answer for every training need. Social tools are changing the game when it comes to employee learning. Organizations can create collaborative workplaces where employees can learn from each other instead of only learning in a formal setting or from the proverbial “company expert.”

For training programs to be effective, companies must use the right methods and medium for their training sessions and their audience. Given the popularity of social media, it only seems logical to explore how social media tools can have a positive impact on the learning experience.

What It Means

While the practice of social learning has been around for ages, we need a better definition of it for today’s workplace. Most of us have a vision for what formal classroom training looks like, so here’s one way to view the basic difference between informal learning and social learning:

• Informal learning is a term used to describe anything not learned in a formal program or class. It can take place within groups or alone using activities such as reading or search.
• Social learning is learning with and from others. It happens at conferences, cafes or online — with or without social media tools.

In the book Social Media at Work, written by Arthur L. Jue, Jackie Alcalde Marr and Mary Ellen Kassotakis, the authors share case studies of companies using social and informal learning for business success. For example, Oracle uses a key tool called Connect to give employees the information they need at the moment they need it. The tool is about more than just answering questions -– it’s teaching people how to make smart decisions about the business.

One thing is certain about social learning: It’s not a replacement for traditional classroom training. “There will always be some kinds of training that must be done in a classroom setting because of the requirements of the training or skill mastery demands,” Bingham explains. “Examples include certification, compliance, and deep learning -– this is happening in the classroom.”

Social Learning Benefits

Surveys of CEOs continue to report that recruiting and developing talent are their top concerns. In addition,ASTD Research notes that by 2020, nearly half (46%) of all U.S. workers will be Millennials.

Organizations have to gain an understanding of how a new generation of workers likes to learn, how they use technology and their preferred means of communication. This will be essential in creating training curriculum, development programs and succession plans.

Bingham says it’s possible to calculate the return on social learning, but it’s not the traditional return-on-investment (ROI) formula: “It requires alignment to what’s important to the organization, and often that includes retaining institutional knowledge, solving complex problems collaboratively and attracting people to your organization.”

Maria Ogneva, director of community at Yammer, says, “If your goal is to increase customer satisfaction, perhaps the impact metric you are looking for is the increase of speed of a response to a customer, and how collaboration helps you do that. For any social effort to be successful, it has to tie to a business objective.”

Barriers to Social Learning

Bingham adds that he sees a concern that the use of social media tools may compromise proprietary informaion, or that issues related to intellectual property, company secrets or business strategy may be divulged by a workforce given social media tools. His recommendation?

“Organizations should have an intellectual property policy in place that outlines clear expectations -– and consequences for inappropriate activity. This policy should consider the multitude of possibilities for the use of an organization’s intellectual property.”

Once guidelines are in place, clearly communicate those throughout the entire organization. The goal isn’t to create obstacles to learning but a respectful, effective means to using social tools.

Implementing Social Learning within Your Organization

Any time a company is testing the new territory, it’s beneficial to start small. Find a program or an initiative that would be well-served by employing social technologies and let the people involved with it experiment and find what works. “Social learning has an organic nature to it, it can’t be forced,” Bingham says.

After using a new technology, evaluate the success of the program. Get feedback on three levels:

• From the participants who used the social tool. How did it help or hinder the learning experience?
• From the administrators of the social tool. Was it easy or difficult to use, explain to others and get participant involvement?
• From the management team. What was their perception of the results gained from using a social tool within their work teams?

This feedback will help refine the best social learning methods to incorporate for future activities.

Social media platforms will continue to develop and evolve. More and more individuals will start using them for their personal brands and professional lives. Employees will demand simplicity and expect workplace training to incorporate the tools they use on a regular basis.

Would you like to see more social in your training programs? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

4:13 p.m. ET: Facebook’s stock came full circle on its first day as a public company, ending the day at $38.23 with more than 500 million shares traded. That’s barely up from its opening price of $38, but shows that Facebook priced the IPO well, although the company may have had some help from underwriters propping up the stock in the closing hours. But with a market cap of $104 billion (according to Yahoo Finance), Facebook is staked with a lot of capital to build on its growth.

3:52 p.m. ET: Facebook’s share price is back where it started at $38. The much anticipated pop is not happening. There’s still time for the stock to dip below its opening price. Facebook priced this well for itself but it won’t get the buzz that comes from a big first day.

3:00 p.m. ET: Facebook’s share price has slipped below $40 to about $39 putting it up about 3 percent on the day. The same can’t be said of Zynga, whose share price continued to drop after trading on the stock was halted a couple of times. The shares are down about 12 percent now.

2:11 p.m. ET: Doesn’t look like we’re going to get a Facebook pop today, unless things heat up later: we’re still hovering between $40 and $41. 386 million shares have changed hands so far today, and speculation is now turning toward what went wrong at the Nasdaq this morning: some traders apparently weren’t sure if their orders had been processed.

1:06 p.m. ET: Not much change in Facebook’s price, which is now at about $41 a share. Interestingly, shares of LinkedIn, Yelp and Pandora are down today. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that underwriters stepped in to ensure Facebook’s stock didn’t dip below itss opening price of $38.

12:48 p.m. ET: Facebook shares continue to float around a bit, hovering around $40 to $41 dollars a share. Meanwhile, Zynga has taken a hit today with its stock price falling by 13 percent following Facebook’s debut. Zynga’s stock, which was halted for a time, is off about 5.68 percent.

12:04 p.m. ET: So far, no big pop for Facebook. Shares seem to be holding strong in the $38-$40 range, just barely above its offer price. The stock price is about $39.51 right now.  At least it’s not pulling a Zynga, and falling below the opening price on the first day. ButLinkedIn, Groupon, Zillow and other recent tech IPOs saw at least a 30 percent pop on the first day of trading.

11:31 a.m. ET: And we’re off! As had been reported earlier this morning, Facebook started trading around $42. Shares are currently at about $40.90, about 7.6 percent above the original price of $38. According to Reuters, 82 million shares changed hands in the first 30 seconds.

11:20  a.m. ET: Alright already, NASDAQ. Trading was supposed to start at 11:05 a.m. But, here we are 15 minutes, still waiting… We’ll keep you updated.

Earlier: The time for talking has passed, and the time for buying has begun. Later today shares of Facebook will begin trading on the NASDAQ stock market in an initial public offering that could set records for the tech industry and rank among the most valuable IPOs in American history.

We’ll track the price of Facebook’s stock below, updating this post throughout the day with news and information about the event. The NASDAQ opens for trading at 9:30 a.m. ET, and closes at 4:00 p.m. ET. Facebook won’t go live immediately — the exchange saves IPO trades so they get their own special boost: we’re expecting Facebook trades to start at 11.

In the meantime, please check out our Facebook IPO coverage up until this point as well as our chart listing recent digital media IPOs, none of which have been as impressive as Facebook’s IPO is expected to be. And if you need some light relief or director’s commentary, check out our links to what the rest of the web is saying.

via gigaom

In many ways Facebook is a very American success: forged at Harvard, warmed up in the crucible of Silicon Valley, and now reaching boiling point by becoming one of the nation’s most valuable companies. But it’s also a very international business, too, with 900 million users spread all around the world.

The company has made no secret of its ambition to make sure every person on the planet is connected to its service. What might seem like hubris, however, is actually necessity: with Wall Street now breathing down its neck, overseas growth is important — investors want to see that however big it has become, Facebook still has headroom left. (Check out our chart of five countries outside the U.S. that could provide Facebook with a lot more users.)

So how will it manage?

First, use its headstart

To understand Facebook’s approach to international growth, it’s worth looking back at the way the company became so global quickly.

From very early on, Facebook had a strong foreign user base. In fact, unlike most companies, it was not really the company’s home success that drove its foreign expansion — it was foreign expansion that fueled its meteoric rise and underpinned its blockbuster flotation.

As early as 2007, the vast international potential was becoming very clear, when London became the single most popular city on Facebook. But then came perhaps its smartest move of all: instead of spending months deciding which markets to target, building local sales teams and internationalizing its product accordingly, Facebook designed a tool that let users translate the service into their own language — effectively crowdsourcing what is usually a slow, labor-intensive job.

And it proved a stunning success: in less than 24 hours, for example, 90 percent of the site had been translated into French. Former Facebooker Andy Johns has called it “the greatest lever” the company had for growth:

It made Facebook a platform capable of supporting everyone on the planet… Growth was not about hiring 10 people per country and putting them in the 20 most important countries and expecting it to grow. Growth was about [engineering] systems of scale and enabling our users to grow the product for us.

It was an inspired, engineering-led approach that allowed Facebook to rapidly scale out into dozens of new territories without ever targeting or investing in them specifically. Take Turkey, a fast-growing internet market with its own language. Without any member of the team ever targeting the country as a business prospect, Facebook became the country’s number 1 social site — and now boasts 92 percent market penetration.

This has all given the company huge reachat relatively little cost, and brought in a ton of revenue too: this year is likely to be the first in which Facebook will make more money outside the United States than in them (U.S. revenue fell from 62 percent in 2010 to 56 percent in 2011).

It’s easy to underestimate the importance of that number. But for some context, compare that with Google, where international revenue only outstripped U.S. revenue for the first time in 2008 — four years after it went public.

Continued international progress is massively important, not least because it’s where new users are coming from.

Pingdom, which found Facebook’s six-month U.S. user growth at just 0.86 percent compared with Brazil’s 54 percent, says: “It seems evident that Facebook needs an expansion plan that involves all corners of the world, but that focuses on certain regions, like Africa and Asia.”

Facebook acknowledges the problem, and the opportunity. Alongside mobile and advertising, it has sold investors on hoped-for international growth. “There are more than two billion global internet users, according to an IDC report dated August 2011,” its S-1 read. “And we aim to connect all of them.”

Now it just has to deliver on that promise.

So where next?

The omens for continued expansion may be good. Thanks to its translation success, Facebook has already unseated eight dominant local-language competitors in the last two years, according to comScore – most recently, Orkut in Brazil and Poland’s Nasa Klasa.pl.

Recent data from Pingdom shows strong gains in other countries, leaving just a handful of nations where Facebook is not the top dog: China, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Russia.

“Now there are only five markets where Facebook is not the #1 social networking site,” a comScore spokesperson told us. “What’s interesting here is that Vietnam, Japan and South Korea are amongst the top four fastest growing markets, with year-over-year growth rates of 80 to 270 percent.”

But these remaining countries are also the toughest nuts to crack. And the biggest prize of all, China, may need a sledge hammer — after all Facebook is blocked by the country’s Great Firewall.

If it can piggyback China’s explosive broadband and mobile internet adoption, Facebook’s own growth may surge even further. But this will be anything but a walk in the park.

Investors have been warned. Facebook’s s-1 filing cautioned:

“We do not know if we will be able to find an approach to managing content and information that will be acceptable to us and to the Chinese government.

“In the event that access to Facebook is restricted, in whole or in part, in one or more countries or our competitors are able to successfully penetrate geographic markets that we cannot access, our ability to retain or increase our user base and user engagement may be adversely affected, we may not be able to maintain or grow our revenue as anticipated, and our financial results could be adversely affected.”

China’s state authorities grant spartan online operating licenses to overseas players, especially powerhouses, leaving the market to indigenous networks, which themselves are allowed to operate only under a strict regime of monitoring and censorship by the government.

That is a controversial and technically difficult task for any social network. But, if it’s good enough for China’s own, it may be a move that Facebook, too, has to consider if it wants to break in.

But it’s not just China that could prove tricky. Google can attest to the difficulties of launching in unfriendly countries. Its $140 million acquisition of the Rambler portal’s Begun contextual ad agency was blocked in 2008 because of what Russian competition authorities said was insufficient paperwork.

And, while trying to make inroads to its five target nations, Facebook must also be on its guard to make sure it protects its leading position in other markets, many of which are small enough that launches or improvements from indigenous competitors could have profound impact.

The revenue question

Even if the company can push growth numbers by securing a dominant position in every single one of the world’s countries, there is another big question: how to keep revenue going up internationally too.

This is a very important problem it faces: during its IPO roadshow, executives explained that while an American user with high disposable income was worth $9.51 in Facebook ad revenue last year, Europe was worth considerably less at $4.86. Asia, meanwhile, came in at $1.79 and the rest of the world made Facebook just $1.42 per user.

So while international growth may be large, the granular detail on income is less impressive. These are not figures that will please Facebook’s investors if they do not rise — and, asThomas Crampton of Social@Ogilvy & Mather’s Asia-Pacific unit has pointed out, users in lower-income countries like India are going to be hard to monetize more effectively.

Getting average revenues up could mean international users seeing more ads; working more partnerships outside the U.S.; using its scale to push revenue strategies that go way beyond advertising (such as a Facebook credit card). It could even require the company ditching a reliance on engineering solutions in favor of pushing harder at the drearier but tried-and-trusted approach of building large local sales teams.

Whatever the case, you can be sure Facebook will be trying everything it can to increase its international audience — and make it as valuable as possible.

via gigaom

Well, that was anticlimactic.

After all the hullabaloo about Facebook’s IPO, this is how it ends, with a mere $0.23 jump in share price? That kind of movement is what happens after Procter & Gamble announces a more absorbent type of Pampers.

Yet it shouldn’t be all that surprising that Facebook’s opening day on the NASDAQ had all the excitement of a Matlockrerun. While no one knows exactly why Facebook landed with such a thud, there are a handful of good reasons that the company got poked by Wall Street. Among them:

1. It Was Priced Just Right

That, however, depends on what your definition of “accurately” is. James Brau, professor of finance at Brigham Young University, says that over the past 40 years of IPOs, the average first-day pop is 18%.

So, if Facebook was looking to perform along those lines, it should have priced its shares in the low 30s.

In addition, underwriters don’t aim for a flat performance on the first day because of a practice called “leaving money on the table,” which rewards institutional investors for getting on board. Though that looks like a kickback of sorts, Brau says there’s no clear-cut reason why IPOs always factor leaving money on the table in.

“There are at least 50 different academic studies I know of that that have 35 different theories,” Brau says.

One popular theory is that it’s a way of rewarding such investors for honesty. The argument goes like this: During an IPO road show, the company and bankers are looking for an accurate read on what investors plan to spend.

If such investors didn’t know that they would be rewarded for telling the truth, then they would intentionally low-ball the amount they intend to buy at. If an institutional investor thought that the stock should be worth $10, say, then they might say they’ll spend $8 to enjoy the ride on the opening day.

2. It’s NASDAQ’s Fault

“It threw it a bit of a curve,” Pleines says. “It may have held it back a little bit.”

3. Investors Are Wary of Social Media Stocks

4. It’s GM’s Fault

Though no other advertisers appear to have followed suit, the move didn’t reassure investors who were already nervous about Facebook’s first-quarter revenue slide and its admitted inability to transition its ad model to mobile.

5. It’s Overvalued

The Golden Arches, with restaurants all over the globe, close-to 100% brand recognition and a proven business model, posted $27 billion in revenues last year and a $5.5 billion profit. Facebook made $1 billion on $3.7 billion in revenues.

Not surprisingly, 79% of investors in a recent Bloomberg poll thought that Facebook was overvalued. As Espen Robak, the president of Pluris Valuation Advisors, told The Atlantic, Facebook’s valuation is plausible because of the company’s tremendous reach.

But, as Robak told the publication, no one knows how Facebook will be able to monetize that reach.

“Think of it this way,” said Robak. “Google has a pretty standard price-earnings ratio right now — around 15 to 20. That’s where Facebook will ultimately have to get. They need vastly larger profit.

“How many more ads can they sell? Four times more in the next year? I don’t think so. They have to get revenues from somewhere else.”

Robak thinks that maybe — just maybe — Facebook will be able to tap into its user data to provide a new solution to advertisers.

6. Retail Investors Are Taking a Wait-And-See Attitude

According to Pleines’ data, no matter how well the recent social media IPOs did on opening day, their stocks were still down — across the board — after the first month.

But it’s not just a social media thing: We may not remember it well, but Google’s stock languished for a month or more after its debut. “While Google did not trade lower in its first month of trading, it did trade back its original open price of $100,” Pleines wrote in a recent note to clients. “But after that it never looked back, trading as high as $196 over the next three months.”

In other words, the question of Facebook’s true value wasn’t answered on Friday. In all likelihood, we won’t know for a few months at least.

via mashable

Lawyers tried to ruin Mark Zuckerberg’s big day with a sprawling lawsuit that portrays the Facebook founder as a rogue hacker, and accuses the company of tracking users on their computers and iPhones. The lawyers want to collect $15 billion for you and me and nearly everyone else on Facebook.

Here’s a plain english Q&A of what’s going on:

What did Facebook do that was so wrong?

The company placed files on users’ computers called cookies that told the social network which websites they visited.

Is that so unusual? I thought lots of sites do that

The problem is that Facebook appears to have tracked you even after you logged-out. Under the company’s own policy, it promised not to do that and thus violated the limits of your consent when it did.

How exactly did Facebook track me?

Many websites like CNN or Justin Bieber Zone have a “Like” button that acts like an extension of Facebook. The company collects data about your visits to those sites — including, it seems, when you are logged out. The unauthorized tracking reportedly took place across smartphones and tablets too.

Well, maybe this was an honest mistake?

After blogger Nik Cubrilovic called out Facebook for stalking its users, the company awkwardly suggested that the tracking of logged-out users was a “bug” or a narrow technical measure. That claim hasn’t stood up well. Cubrilovic and German regulators soon called BS and suggested Facebook was doing this deliberately for more than a year. The lawsuit also points to a Facebook patent application for cookies that follow users after they log out.

So where did this lawsuit come from?

There are actually more than a dozen cases across the country. They were recently consolidated into one lawsuit in San Jose, California.

Why are the lawyers asking for $15 billion?

It’s a great way to grab headlines during a week the press is already in a Facebook frenzy. The $15 billion itself is loosely based on the Wiretap Act which lets people sue for $10,000 if someone records their conversation without permission. The lawsuit also cites studies that claim an individual’s web history is worth $52. There are also state law penalties. And so on. The lawyers had to pick some number so they chose $15 billion.

Will Facebook actually have to pay that $15 billion?

The short answer is no. The Wiretap Act was written with telephone conversations in mind so it’s no slam dunk that a court will decide the law should apply the same way to computer cookies (Google, HTC and Samsung are facing similar lawsuitsunder the same legal theory). At the same time, some judges have ruled that Facebook-style “privacy invasions” aren’t worth anything in dollar terms because no one has been harmed.

In this case, however, a judge would likely conclude that Facebook’s behavior (if the allegations are true) was egregious enough to find liability under at least one of the plaintiffs’ 11 claims. But if other tech related privacy suits are anything to go by, the case will settle long before a trial.

I’m on Facebook. Will I get some of that money?

Doubtful. While the class action aspires to cover everyone who was on Facebook from May 2010 to September 2011, a cash payout is unlikely. As noted above, judges have a hard time putting a dollar value on this type of privacy breach. When there has been a privacy settlement in other tech-related cases (like Google Buzz or Facebook Beacon), the money has been divided up between lawyers and non-profit groups that act as privacy activists.

What does Mark Zuckerberg have to do with all this?

The lawsuit paints the Facebook CEO as a creep who has a long history of using his hacking skills to steal people’s personal data. The complaint opens by reproducing this email exchange:

The lawsuit also lists a chronological history intended to show that Zuckerberg and his company have long displayed a systemic disregard for user privacy. This is, of course, just a legal tactic that doesn’t necessarily prove that Facebook is any better or worse than other tech companies on privacy issues. Facebook, which told Bloomberg the complaint is baseless, would likely add that this was an accident that shouldn’t detract from the fact it provides a popular free service to millions of people.

Are lawsuits the best way to solve the privacy problem?

Probably not. But since the government often has a hard time understanding (let alone regulating) the tech industry, the lawsuits can be an effective way of raising awareness and forcing companies to take care about how they handle consumer data.

Here’s the complaint itself:

Facebook Wiretap Act Complaint Copy

via gigaom

Small businesses on the West Coast of the U.S. are far more social-media savvy than those on the East Coast — with companies in San Francisco and Los Angeles leading the pack, according to a new study.

Small business analytics accompany has released aninfographic that looks at the top 85 U.S. cities and ranks them by social media presence and daily deal activity.

San Francisco topped the list of the most social small business cities in the U.S., followed by (in order) Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Seattle; San Diego; Chicago; New York; Dallas/Fort Worth; Phoenix; and Tampa, Fla.

SEE ALSO: Top 10 Social Media-Savvy Universities [STUDY]

Although New York is ranked seventh — following the news that more tech companies are expanding in the Big Apple — many other major East Coast cities such as Boston didn’t make the top 20. However, Washington. D.C.. was ranked third.

Meanwhile, many smaller cities are also using social media to connect. For example, Grand Rapids, Mich. (29%) and Oklahoma, Okla. (28%) have the highest percentage of small businesses with Facebook pages. Meanwhile, Rochester, Minn. (20%) has the highest percentage of small businesses embracing Foursquare check-ins.

“The report reinforces the shift in marketing where small business are embracing social media,” Darian Shirazi, founder and CEO of Radius, told Mashable. “We were not surprised to see the typical large metro areas be at the top of the list, but were surprised to see many smaller metro areas perform well or even better than large metro areas.”

Image via iStock, CourtneyK

via  mashable

Stock market debut: 5/24/2011
Deal size: $1.3 billion
Valuation: $8.4 billion
Number of shares offered: 52.2 million
Set price/share: $25
Opening price/share: $35
* Most-recent opening price: $21.93

YNDX data by YCharts

Stock market debut: 12/16/2011
Deal size: $1 billion
Valuation: $7 billion
Number of shares offered: 100 million
Set price/share: $10
Opening price/share: $11
Most-recent opening price: $8.49

ZNGA data by YCharts

Stock market debut: 5/4/2011
Deal size: $743 million
Valuation: $4 billion
Number of shares offered: 53.1 million
Set price/share: $14
Opening price/share: $18
Most-recent opening price: $6.39

RENN data by YCharts

Stock market debut: 11/4/2011
Deal size: $700 million
Valuation: $10.5 billion
Number of shares offered: 35 million
Set price/share: $20
Opening price/share: $28
Most-recent opening price: $12.66

GRPN data by YCharts

Stock market debut: 5/19/2011
Deal size: $353 million
Valuation: $4 billion
Number of shares offered: 7.8 million
Set price/share: $45
Opening price/share: $83
Most-recent opening price: $112

LNKD data by YCharts

Stock market debut: 6/15/2011
Deal size: $235 million
Valuation: $2.6 billion
Number of shares offered: 161 million
Set price/share: $16
Opening price/share: $20
Most-recent opening price: $11.50

P data by YCharts

Stock market debut: 1/26/2011
Deal size: $151.3 million
Valuation: $1.5 billion
Number of shares offered: 8.9 million
Set price/share: $17
Opening price/share: $23.50
Most-recent opening price: $9.06

DMD data by YCharts

Stock market debut: 3/2/2012
Deal size: $107.3 million
Valuation: $898 million
Number of shares offered: 7.15 million
Set price/share: $15
Opening price/share: $22
Most-recent opening price: $21.63

YELP data by YCharts

Stock market debut: 2/17/2012
Deal size: $55 million
Valuation: $290 million
Number of shares offered: 5 million
Set price/share: $11
Opening price/share: $14.30
Most-recent opening price: $14.98

BCOV data by YCharts

Stock market debut: 5/11/2011
Deal size: $50 million
Valuation: $263 million
Number of shares offered: 5 million
Set price/share: $10
Opening price/share: $10
Most-recent opening price: $1.15

via gigaom

Twitter announced Thursday it will take part in “Do Not Track,” a cookie-blocking feature found in Mozilla’s Firefox browser that’s promoted by the Federal Trade Commission. What does that mean for you, the user?

When a Firefox user enables Do Not Track, the browser prevents websites from using cookies to track the user’s behavior and personal information. Do Not Track only works on sites that have signed on to the service — a list which now includes Twitter.

Cookies can be used for many purposes, including storing information that some, including Google, argue makes browsing the web easier (a weather site might remember your postal code, for example). However, some believe that cookie-based tracking is a breach of privacy. Facebook has previously come under fire forfollowing users around non-Facebook sites.

Cookies are also an essential ingredient for websites serving up advertisements based on user’s behavior or location, called “behavioral ads.”

Different sites use cookies for different purposes. According to Twitter’s privacy guide, Twitter uses cookies to learn how users interact with its services, monitor web traffic and improve its products. It will now also use them to suggest new accounts for users to follow based on their interests.

If you enable Do Not Track, you’re opting out of having your data collected for those purposes, making you, your profile and your tweets more anonymous. Wave goodbye to the new account suggestions — but that may be all you’re missing out on.

Do Not Track is, at its core, a trade off. It asks of you: Do you prefer ease of use and customized user suggestions or more anonymity from web services? According to Mozilla, 8.6% of desktop Firefox users and 19% of mobile users are choosing the latter, with nearly half of those users reporting they feel more safe surfing the Internet with Do Not Track enabled.

Update: In a new blog post, Twitter suggests that Do Not Track will only impact suggestions of users to follow. A Twitter spokesperson told Mashable that Do Not Track will have no impact on Twitter’s advertising methods.

For more information on Do Not Track, visit Mozilla’s website.

We reached out to Twitter for further information about Do Not Track. We will update this post with any response.

via mashable

Everyone’s talking about the Facebook IPO — and for good reason.

Facebook is currently valued at around $100 billion, though it made less than $4 billion in revenue last year. Still, if the social network with more than 901 million users plays its cards right, it could be the world’s first $1 trillion company by 2014.

The Facebook IPO is slated for Friday. New investors can potentially buy around 421 million shares of Facebook stock at $38 a pop.

The big question is: should you buy Facebook stock while it’s hot? Multiple financial experts told us no — at $38 per share, the stock is overpriced.

Former NYU Stern School of Business finance professor Kenneth Froewiss believes adding Facebook to a portfolio early on is risky for experienced pros and investment amateurs alike. It’s like playing the lottery, he says.

“Even for those individuals with above-average net worth, purchasing shares at an IPO, especially a ‘hot’ one that has been widely hyped, is rarely a good idea,” Froewiss says.

“Might someone on occasion reap a tremendous windfall by doing so? Yes, but then again, on occasion someone wins the lottery. That does not make the lottery a great investment in general.”

Factors that can affect Facebook stock are legion. The current excitement about the company’s stock market debut doesn’t guarantee long-term interest or success.

“In my experience this stock and its IPO has seen more enthusiasm than any other I have seen over my 40 years of investment experience,” says Lewis Altfest, Ph.D., CEO of NYC-based Altfest Personal Wealth Management.

The social network’s success or failure may lie in its ability to conquer the mobile space — which is growing faster than the company is adapting. Post-IPO, Facebook will have to ramp up its mobile ads to push profits.

Facebook reported $205 million in the first quarter of 2012 — down from December’s high of $302 million. “Revenue in the last quarter was actually off quarter-to-quarter,” Altfest says. “They have to deliver revenue growth. Over a longer period, they will have to deliver earnings.”

Altfest advises average consumers wait at least six months. He warns in the following weeks after the IPO, demand will cause stock prices to stay high, which is normal for an IPO debut. But it may eventually fall.

“Even in stocks there are laws of gravity,” he says. “Take a deep breath and come back in six months.”

Joshua Gans, professor at University at Toronto’s School of Management, advises people do nothing instead. “All of the uncertainties surrounding Facebook will not get resolved in the six months,” Gans says. “We’ll only know a decade from now whether it has a permanent place in the economy like Microsoft.”

Microsoft traded at $22 per share at its IPO in 1986. Now it’s $61 per share.

SEE ALSO: Facebook Meets Wall Street: How the IPO Stacks Up With Tech’s Titans

“There’s a scenario where Facebook clearly becomes the next Google or Apple, but there’s also a scenario where it simply does not and it ends up more like Yahoo,” Gans tells Mashable.

A safer alternative is buying into an index fund such as the S&P 500 instead of buying Facebook shares directly. Owners of an index fund can reap the benefits of the entire stock index doing well — without suffering sudden losses when a company’s stock tanks.

“Facebook will eventually be included in that, and it will be part of an index fund and you can buy it that way,” Gans says.

Some financial experts see Facebook as a good buy now. Lubos Pastor, finance professor at the University of Chicago, says it’s financially beneficial for investors to buy shares at IPO price. After the price of public shares rise, users have “historically earned subpar returns”, he says.

“However, the poor average post-IPO returns have been driven mostly by small firms, so it is quite possible that a large firm like Facebook will turn out to be a good investment,” Pastor says.

via mashable

So much is about to change for you, Facebook. Don’t be afraid, the transformation you’re about to experience is natural. Or at least natural for any private company undergoing the biggest tech IPO in history.

Yet, as you undergo this perfectly normal maturation, something that, to be honest, we’ve been waiting for for a long time (no, we didn’t want to rush you, but it was getting to be quite obvious to everyone that it was time), it’s important to remember who you are and what it means to be a full-grown public company with countless stock holders and the SEC breathing down your neck.

Things like this can confuse and scare you. It can change you in unintended ways. I’m here to remind you: Don’t let it. Always remember:

1) Don’t Forget Who Got You Here

Remember the early days? When Mark Zuckerberg, a young Harvard college student, dreamed you up in a dorm room? He was probably mostly interested in meeting girls, but ended up creating the most important social platform of our time. Even so, in 2004, you were still just this tiny little private network with hundreds, not hundreds of millions, of users. And you were closed, not yet worldly, or, at least, open to the world. I remember what it was like before you let everyone in and when you finally opened “The Facebook” to people outside of college. One, it was adorable the way you called yourself “The Facebook”. Two, I was so proud of you when you realized that you could handle users who were not just like Mark Zuckerberg.

Now, as you prepare to get, perhaps, bigger and more powerful than ever, I want you to remember those first years and the members who made Facebook what it is today. You are nothing without them.

2) Dream Big

Facebook, you have accomplished a lot in your short time here on earth: You’ve helped hundreds of millions of people reconnect and then stay connected (whether they want to or not). You’ve let them chat with and poke each other. You’ve built a platform where they can watch movies together or surreptitiously track what their friends are reading, watching and reading. You’ve introduced time-wasting social games to people who never even played a console game before.

Despite all that, I think you’re just getting started. Starting this week, your pockets will be bursting with cash. That’s money to make magic happen for you and your users. There are so many things you can do with it, but be wise. With big dreams comes big responsibility.

3) Make Good Choices

I’m still not sure I agree with you paying $1 billion for Instagram. It’s a great photo sharing service, but the math doesn’t really add up. Perhaps you were a bit impulsive. That’s OK. Of course, it’s not something you can do with all those investors watching. If you want to spend that money on something useful, buy yourself a really good search engine. I can’t find a thing in you, Facebook!

You will also face new pressures in this adult world, Facebook. Investors will demand dividends and a healthy bottom line. Advertising is the key, but not the cudgel. I know, I know Facebook, the breakup with GM was tough and came at exactly the wrong time, but trust me, there will be other advertisers. Good ones that see your potential and realize amazing results from your nearly 1 billion members. However, do not let those advertisers steer you. They are partners, not parents. Make sure that what they offer is something your members truly want. If you make the wrong choices here, Facebook, your members will pay for it and, ultimately, so will you.

SEE ALSO: The Facebook IPO Timeline

4) Be a Good Communicator

You weren’t always good at this Facebook, but in recent years I’ve noticed a welcome change: You’re growing up and getting ahead of your problems by talking to users before these issues get out of hand. You’ve stopped letting Zuckerberg write unfiltered posts and managed your message. This is the sign of a true adult. Don’t let fear of what investors and the world will say change that. Now that you’re public (and crazy rich) it’s more important than ever to maintain transparency. Facebook, you cannot survive without it.

5) Laugh

Facebook, you will make mistakes. You’ll mess up in big and small ways, but you have to maintain a sense of humor. Be ready to laugh at your missteps and help the organization and your users move on. If you shut down when bad things happen, they will only get worse. Lighten the mood when things go wrong. And when things go right, maintain that sense of playfulness (Your ex-friend Google is expert at this). If I’m being honest here, Facebook, we have been worried about you. You’ve been a bit closed off and humorless lately. Maybe it’s the stress of this IPO or it’s how you think you need to grow up. Let me tell you, Facebook, laughing is one of the few things that makes life worth living.

6) Respect Others

Now comes the tough part of our conversation. Remember that time you got in trouble with the law? Well, how can you forget? It’s on your permanent record and the FTC is still watching you because of it. I want you to listen to me: You’re a public company now with almost 1 billion users; you cannot mess this up. You must have the privacy and security of your users at the top of every single list. No action should happen without checking off those two boxes first. It is, Facebook, a sign of maturity and respect. I know you think that privacy is an old man’s game, but you have many people in your network who believe there is no more important game. Don’t fight it. Accept it and use your money and power for good. Always show respect.

7) Avoid Mediocrity

You, Facebook are by no means the first to go public, nor will you be the last. Some who have gone before you have put on adult pants, a button-down shirt and blazer and walked away forever from their hoodies and more fanciful youth. They took their money and, yes, grew, but also allowed themselves to slip into complacent mediocrity. Facebook, this is not the path we want for you. You are so much more than this. Take this opportunity and do great and unexpected things.

Today, Facebook, you are a public company. Now accept this pen as a gift and go make us all proud.

via mashable