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Maybe it's advice he heard from a career counselor at Harvard and took to heart: Do what you love, and the money will follow. For now, what Mark Zuckerberg wants most for Facebook is to see it grow and grow and grow some more, without too much fretting over the bottom line.

In an interview with a blogger for the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Facebook's co-founder and CEO minced no words on the matter: "Growth is primary, revenue is secondary."

Of course, it could be less a philosophical matter than a practical one for a … Read more

A number of nifty applications have popped up in response to the 2008 elections, like Google's tool to search political speeches and the Obama iPhone application. One more social-networking application is attempting to gain from the current political fever with a very speculative electoral map. For an application with only 321 active monthly users on Facebook, the myPicks U.S. Election 2008 electoral college map looks surprisingly (though certainly not completely) reasonable.

Developed by the Indian company Pramati Technologies, using the Sun Microsystems' social-application tool zembly, myPicks U.S. Election 2008 is a game that lets you "run&… Read more

It's hardly unexpected, but Facebook has integrated Microsoft's Live Search into its site.

As part of a deal announced in July, users can now search the Web using Microsoft's search engine without leaving Facebook. Of course, as Mashable points out, there are lots of other ways to search the Internet without leaving Facebook (say, using the Google Toolbar).

Although it's garden variety search today, there are some interesting possibilities--and also some nightmarish scenarios--one can imagine down the road, when one combines search with social networking.

The real question, for now, is how much of a boost … Read more

Facebook and MySpace are the most popular social networking destinations for mobile phone users, according to a survey conducted by ABI Research.

Researchers found that 46 percent of those who use social networks have visited their favorite services on a mobile phone. Out of that group, nearly 70 percent visited MySpace on their mobile phone and 67 percent visited Facebook. No other social network was able to muster 15 percent mobile adoption.

The study also found that about 50 percent of respondents are checking comments and messages from their friends when they access social networks from their phones, while 45 … Read more

Update: Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed Moskovitz's departure from the company, saying "Dustin has always had Facebook's best interests at heart and will always be someone I turn to for advice."

Dustin Moskowitz, one of Mark Zuckerberg's co-founders at Facebook and one of the young CEO's longtime confidants, has left the company according to Valleywag. He's leaving to found an undisclosed new company with Justin Rosenstein, another departing Facebook engineer, the blog said.

Moskowitz, who served as a head engineer at the social network, was one of Facebook's earliest … Read more

Developers who have created applications for Facebook's platform can now bring them over to social network Friendster. This means that Friendster supports both Facebook's code and OpenSocial, the standard created by Google for social-network widgets.

"Friendster's support of both the Facebook and OpenSocial platforms is a big win for business and individual developers, as well as for Friendster users," David Jones, vice president of global marketing for Friendster, said in a release. "For the developers that have invested resources in developing and launching a Facebook app, Friendster has now made it very easy for … Read more

As it expands across the globe, social network Facebook will establish its official international headquarters in the Irish capital of Dublin, the Irish Times reported Thursday. The announcement was made by Mary Coughlan, Ireland's minister for enterprise, trade, and employment, and the Times hinted that the company is already recruiting to build up a local workforce.

The Dublin office will be the center of Facebook's operations for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, from ad sales to technical support.

"After exploring various locations throughout the region, we decided Ireland was the best place to establish our new … Read more

When the news broke earlier this week that Facebook had hired D.C. veteran Ted Ullyot as its general counsel, many news outlets (this one included) took it to mean that this was the first time that the young company had hired executive-level internal counsel.

Not so: as reported by Law.com, Facebook's prior general counsel, Rudy Gadre, had left the company in July "to move to Seattle and spend more time with his family." Gadre had actually been at Facebook since 2006.

Regardless of the validity of the ages-old "spend more time with the family&… Read more

The team at Pingdom, a firm that focuses primarily on uptime and performance, has posted a new blog entry estimating that Facebook will overtake MySpace as the top social network in the U.S. within a month or two. That's largely because, according to the same numbers, Facebook has doubled in size in the past year.

Several months ago, traffic firm ComScore noted that Facebook--a year ago far smaller than the News Corp.-owned MySpace--was starting to pass its rival in worldwide traffic. But in the U.S., which still has the big ad dollars, MySpace remained bigger.

There'… Read more