Silicon Alley Insider - Vasanth Sridharan | July 8, 2008 3:11 PM

Facebook is launching its long-awaited redesign next week. The changes have been previewed since early May, and they are a pretty thorough overhaul of the current design. They organize everything into tabs, and remove a lot of the clutter from profiles.

Application developers aren’t crazy about the changes, though. They say that the redesign makes it much harder for their apps to spread, partly because it will be harder for users to add application boxes to their profile where other users can easily see them.

The redesign launches in beta, and users can choose to opt in and use the entire new site.

source: SAI

Silicon Alley Insider - Michael Learmonth | July 7, 2008 9:48 AM

How did Barack Obama come to dominate Facebook? One move that helped: Hiring Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes in early 2007.

Hughes, 24, was Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard roommate. Now he runs Obama’s own social network, My.BarackObama.com, which has 900k members (up from 850,000 a week ago, apparently, when BusinessWeek paid homage to Obama’s Web strategy.)

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Silicon Alley Insider - Peter Kafka | June 29, 2008 3:28 PM

Great weekend reading via PE Hub: An interview with TheGlobe.com cofounder Stephan Paternot, who has created a new, post-Bubble 1.0 identity for himself as an early stage investor (among his investments: phanfare, where SAI co-founder Dwight Merriman is a director). The whole thing is worth your time, but if you’re Mark Zuckerberg, or any of the Facebook execs thinking about liquidity, you’ll want to skip right to the last part:

What did you learn about personal money management that you could share with young entrepreneurs today?
I had zero money management experience at the time. I was 24 when TheGlobe went public. I didn’t think to put anything in a bank account and diversify. My advice would be that if you’re company is worth anything, $5 million or $15 million, and you have the chance to take some money off the table, do it!

source: SAI