Facebook confirmed in a filing that Mark Zuckerberg, the social network’s founder and CEO, is taking a $1 salary this year, and foregoing any bonuses.

But he’s not exactly taking a vow of poverty. When Facebook went public last year, Zuckerberg exercised 60 million stock options, then worth nearly $2.3 billion, buying those shares for next to nothing. (He sold half of the stock to cover his tax bill.) And he’s still sitting on another 60 million stock options that can be exercised on Nov. 7, 2015, for the same dirt-cheap price of $0.06.

All of those shares give Zuckerberg plenty of incentive to keep Facebook in good financial health, although he is on record saying, “We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money,” and isn’t really beholden to shareholders, since he controls a majority of proxy votes.

The $1 salary is symbolic. Companies have to compensate all of their employees, so working for free is out of the question — and doesn’t $1 sound better, anyway? Since the first dot-com boom, getting paid $1 has become something of a tradition among extremely wealthy executives whose compensation instead comes in the form of stock.

Steve Jobs famously took a $1 salary from the time he returned to Apple as CEO in 1998; he didn’t take any stock grants after 2003, either. In 2005, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, along with then-CEO Eric Schmidt, all reduced their salaries to $1. Schmidt, now executive chairman, takes a salary of several million dollars these days; Page, now CEO, and Brin still make $1.

Other tech CEOs who belong to the $1 salary club include Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Zynga’s Mark Pincus, and HP’s Meg Whitman. Yahoo’s Jerry Yang was making $1 before he was ousted as CEO last year. Outside of Silicon Valley, CEOs of American companies who made $1 in salary last year include Capital One’s Richard Fairbank, Urban Outfitters’ Richard Hayne, Fossil’s Kosta Kartsotis, Kinder Morgan’s Richard Kinder and Duke Energy’s James Rogers.

Among the $1 salary club, only Karsotis, the watchmaker’s longtime leader, actually made nothing in 2012, according to a Bloomberg analysis of proxy filings. He owns 11% of the company but didn’t receive any additional stock or stock options last year. “Mr. Kartsotis is one of the initial investors in our company and expressed his belief that his primary compensation is met by continuing to drive stock price growth,”the company explained in its filing.

That’s generally how $1 salaries are explained, but sometimes they come in the form of punishment or self-flagellation. When Lee Iacocca was brought in to save Chrysler from bankruptcy in 1978, he took a $1 salary as a publicity stunt. Vikram Pandit’s salary was reduced to $1 in 2010, as Citigroup struggled to recover from the financial crisis, and executive compensation packages on Wall Street were facing intense public criticism; he was still fired two years later.

Zuckerberg’s $1 salary for 2013 was first revealed in Facebook’s IPO filing, but the proxy filing yesterday confirmed the amount and added that he won’t receive any bonus, either. It also revealed that Zuckerberg received a $266,101 bonus last year in addition to his $500,000 base salary. He also gets to use Facebook’s private planes, of course. Professional trips don’t count as compensation, but his personal trips on Air Facebook last year cost more than $1.2 million.

Image via AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

Facebook is updating its iOS apps to include the chat heads feature this week, with the necessary update hitting the app store Tuesday, the company has announced.

iPhone users who download the update will start to see chat heads pop up over the next couple of weeks, Facebook says.

Chat heads was unveiled as part of the Facebook Home announcement two weeks ago. Messages received on Facebook appear as bubbles with your friends’ heads in them. You can drag the bubbles around the sides of your screen. Clicking on them reveals the message; dragging them to the bottom dismisses the chats altogether.

On Facebook Home, a new downloadable layer that sits on top of Android, chat heads appear on your home screen and lock screen. On the iPhone and iPad, they will only appear within the Facebook app.

Keith Schroepfer, CTO and VP of engineering told the D: Dive Into Mobile conference that the iOS app update featuring chat heads would be pushed out at some point this week. Facebook later clarified that the update would arrive Tuesday, but that chat heads would be a staggered rollout.

Most Americans now know the feeling of typing something into a social media input box, thinking again, and deciding against posting whatever it was. But while it certainly seemed like a widespread phenomenon, no one had actually quantified the extent of this “self-censorship.”

But now, new research based on a sample of 3.9 million Facebook users reveals precisely how widespread this activity is. Carnegie Mellon PhD student Sauvik Das and Facebook’s Adam Kramer measured how many people typed more than five characters into Facebook content-input boxes, but then did not post them. They term this “last-minute self-censorship.” The research was posted to Das’ website and will presented at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s conference on Weblogs and Social Media in July.

The numbers are impressively large. Fully one-third of all Facebook posts were self-censored, according to the method Das and Kramer devised, though they warn they probably captured a substantial number of false positives. 71 percent of all the users surveyed engaged in some self-censorship either on new posts or in comments, and the median self-censorer did so multiple times. 

Perhaps the most interesting part of the study was the demographic correlations with self-censorship. Men self-censored more often, particularly if they had large numbers of male friends. Interestingly, people with more diverse friend groups — measured by age, political affiliation, and gender — were less likely to self-censor. 

While the researchers declined to speculate in this study about why people may or may not have self-censored, earlier research with a small group of users found five reasons people chose not share what they’d written: aversion to sparking an argument or other discussion, concern their post would offend or hurt someone, felt their post was boring or repetitive, decided the content undermined their desired self-presentation, or were just unable to post due to a technological or other constraint.

For Facebook users, the main takeaway here is probably: Feel free not to share. Facebook, on the other hand, has to have a more complex relationship to this research. Their interaction and business models depend on sharing, but it’s not hard to imagine some circumstances in which it would be better not to share: racist content, say. So, Das and Kramer say that future research should address when the non-sharing is “adaptive,” (which I think means good, in this context) and when, in the words of Das and Kramer, “users and their audience could fail to achieve potential social value from not sharing certain content, and the [social-network service] loses value from the lack of content generation.”

If you’ve ever moved to a new city, you’ve undoubtedly continued to receive Facebook Events from your hometown — either from well-meaning friends, or those who just invite their entire address books.

Social networking is amazing because we can keep in touch with anyone across the country. Friends that move, family in other states, new connections abroad are all important, so it makes sense you’d want to include them when planning any event on Facebook.

Unfortunately, while you might be worried about your friend’s fear of missing out, think instead how he’ll feel being bombarding with Facebook notifications for events he can’t attend. Inviting everyone on your Facebook friends list makes you seem less thoughtful than you think.

It’s always nice to be included. That is, unless it’s a Facebook Event for a 20-piece recorder recital playing Nickleback’s greatest hits.

Since Facebook added the ability to plan events and invite your friends a few years ago, it’s become one of the post popular online ways to organize get-togethers. It’s also a feature that pisses people off.

Ashley Kiley needed a vacation. A Facebook vacation.

“I needed a break from everyone. I was on the site too much and was wasting too much time looking at information about friends,” Kiley, 27, told ABC News.

She had hit a wall — no pun intended — and decided to give up Facebook for a while. And Kiley isn’t alone. In fact, the majority of Facebook users are doing or have done the same thing.

According to a new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 61 percent of Facebook users have taken a voluntary multi-week break from the social network at one point or another. According to Pew, two thirds of online American adults are now on Facebook. (Facebook says it has over a billion active users worldwide, people who log on at least once a month.) Pew’s research was based on a phone survey of 1,006 adult Americans over the age of 18.

So why are they taking some time off? Twenty-one percent of those who took “Facebook vacations” did it because they were too busy and “didn’t have time for it,” 10 percent said it was becoming a waste of time, while 8 percent said they were sending too much time using the site. Nine percent said there was too much drama, gossip and negativity on the site or among their friends. Twenty percent of those who do not currently use Facebook said they once used the site and have quit.

But not everyone decides giving up Facebook for a while is the route to go. Pew’s latest data shows that 27 percent of Facebook users plan to spend less time on the site in the coming year; 69 percent plan to spend the same amount of time on the site. Only three percent plan to spend more time on the site.

Overall, the new data from Pew show that many people are trying to figure out how to balance their time on Facebook. “The data shows that people are trying to make new calibrations in their life to accommodate new social tools,” Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet Project and a co-author of the new report, told ABC News. “For some, the central calculation is how they spend their time. For others, it’s more of a social reckoning as they ask themselves, ‘What are my friends doing and thinking and how much does that matter to me?’”

What the survey doesn’t show, though, is that for many, taking those Facebook vacations can be beneficial. Like a real vacation, some come back rejuvenated and with a new outlook.

“I came back because I felt like I was out of the loop,” Kiley, who returned to the site after a month away, said. “But I now budget my time better and don’t always find myself reaching for my phone to check my Newsfeed. I now know I can live without it.”

We recently announced some proposed updates to our Data Use Policy, which explains how we collect and use data when people use Facebook, and our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR), which explains the terms governing use of our services.

The updates provide you with more detailed information about our practices and reflect changes to our products, including:

• New tools for managing your Facebook Messages;
• Changes to how we refer to certain products;
• Tips on managing your timeline; and
• Reminders about what’s visible to other people on Facebook.

We are also proposing changes to our site governance process for future updates to our Data Use Policy and SRR. We deeply value the feedback we receive from you during our comment period but have found that the voting mechanism created a system that incentivized quantity of comments over the quality of them. So, we are proposing to end the voting component in order to promote a more meaningful environment for feedback. We also plan to roll out new engagement channels, including a feature for submitting questions about privacy to our Chief Privacy Officer of Policy.

We encourage you to review these proposed changes and give us feedback before we finalize them. Please visit the “Documents” tab of the Facebook Site Governance Page https://www.facebook.com/fbsitegovernance to learn more about these changes and to submit comments before 9 AM PST on November 28, 2012.

You can also follow and like the Site Governance Page for updates on this process and on any future changes to our Data Use Policy or SRR.

Your timeline: You have settings that help you design how your timeline will appear to others, like hiding things from your timeline. Remember that this only impacts whether those things are visible on your timeline. Those posts are still visible elsewhere, like in news feed, on other people’s timelines, or in search results. You can delete your own posts from your timeline or activity log, or ask someone else to delete a post you’re tagged in.

Cookies info: Technologies like cookies, pixels, and local storage are used to deliver, secure, and understand products, services, and ads, on and off Facebook. Learn moreabout how we and our partners use cookies and similar technologies.

Have you ever gone through your friends list and wondered, “How do I know this person?” There’s actually a way to see all engagement between yourself and a friend — friendship pages, which recently got the timeline treatment.

Facebook Software Engineer Arun Vijayvergiya wrote about the changes in the Newsroom blog. Not everyone has this format for friendship pages just yet, but it’s rolling out gradually:

Starting today, we’re introducing a new layout for friendship pages. Friendship pages combine posts, photos and events that you and another person have shared. Click the gear menu at the top of a friend’s timeline to see a friendship page. If you’ve listed yourself as “in a relationship” with someone, you can also visit facebook.com/us to see the friendship page you share with that person.

Here’s the new format:

Here’s the old format:

Friendster Founder Launches News Service Based on Social Networks

Jonathan Abrams, founder of Friendster, credited as being the first social network to hit the Web in 2002, has released a new social-news service.

Abrams’ new startup, called Nuzzel, aggregates news your friends have shared across social networks. It compiles them into categories, and an additional section called “news you may have missed.” The site launched on Thursday.

Nuzzel users log in to the site using their Facebook or Twitter accounts, and the system’s algorithms then aggregate links to news articles shared by friends or followers. The service also includes recommended content not shared through a user’s network.

Abrams is no stranger to web startups, having previously launched Socializr and HotLinks, and currently runs the Founders Den in San Francisco, Calif., but he coded Nuzzel alone. Abrams created the site based on his Twitter experiences –- he found he was getting news more often from the accounts he followed rather than through RSS feeds, but thought he was still missing a lot of stories. He’s yet to raise any funds for the site or hire any employees.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had a tough week: His sister went to work for his top competitor, Google, his company’s stock price hit a new low and now he has dropped out of the top 10 tech billionaires list.

Zuckerberg’s fortune fell by $423 million on Thursday to $10.2 billion. That puts him $400 million behind James Goodnight, the co-founder of SAS Institute, the new number 10 on the $21 billion when the company went public in May. Zuckerberg owns 503.6 million shares of his company including 60 million options with an exercise price of $.06 a share. He also has $150 million in cash and other liquid assets, Bloomberg reports.

Facebook’s stock price on Thursday was down 47% from its $38 debut. On Friday morning, however, the stock was up about 2%.

Facebook is testing a new feature for desktop and mobile, Save for Later, which will let you add stories to a Saved folder. Saving stories will provide a similar experience to adding a tweet to your Favorites on Twitter.

The folder lives under Apps in Facebook’s iOS and desktop versions. To save a story, hold your finger down on the feature and a pop-up saying “Save” will appear. On Facebook desktop, the Save option will be under stories next to Share, Comment and Like.

“We are testing the ability to save news feed stories with a small percentage of users,” the company told Mashable.

According to iMore, your friends won’t receive a notification when you save their stories, distinguishing the new Facebook feature from Twitter’s Favorites.

As we’ve learned from other recent features Facebook has tested, such as “Find Friends Nearby,” rolling a feature out for a few members is by no means a guarantee of universal adoption. Facebook pulled that feature just one day after it began testing.

Facebook just upgraded photo viewing and sharing.

Hover over the like button of any page you liked.

Make sure “Show in News Feed” Is Clicked.

In the coming weeks, Facebook plans to allow advertisers to begin purchasing its Marketplace ads on a real-time bidding basis. The idea is to increase the value of this inventory by allowing advertisers to use their own data for targeting. Though there’s been much speculation about Facebook starting an ad network like the Google Content Network, this is not that — it will only involve Facebook inventory. Ads will be sold on a CPM basis via third-party demand-side platforms (DSPs) and will be targeted via browser cookies — which will enable retargeting and other behavioral options. Bloomberg reports that the partners for selling ads will include TellApart, Turn, Triggit, DataXu, MediaMath, AppNexus, The Trade Desk and AdRoll.com. Ad slots on the exchanges will only include Marketplace ads, the standard right-side-of-the page ads that feature a headline, text and a small image. They can link to a Facebook Page or an Event, or to an outside URL. Neither sponsored stories nor premium ads will be included in the exchange.

Advertisers have been clamoring for ways to apply data — and collect data — from Facebook advertising, so this would seem to be a first step in that direction. Previously, ads could only be targeted by interests and demographics.

Facebook has proven itself to be a strategic purchaser of companies, having paid $1 billion for Instagram just after its release on Android. After being made available for Google’s open source OS,Instagram installations exploded to total more than 50 million subscribers. Now, with Facebook a public company having to answer to its legion of stockholders, the company is seeking to buy another company where it can use its large number of subscribers to make a ton ofcash. One such company apparently in Facebook’s sight is Oslo, Norway based Opera Software. Opera’s stock soared 26% on Tuesday due to the rumors of a bid for the third party browser firm.

Opera’s browsers allow for a pleasant surfing experience, even on those phones on the low end of the technology spectrum. Opera Mini uses the company’s own servers to load up a web site before compressing it and sending it to a phone, thus potentially saving the user from some data charges. Over 168 million people use Opera Mini. Opera Mobile is a third party replacement for a smartphone’s stock browser and uses the phone’s own technology to render sites.

Investment bankers say that Opera has been up for sale for some time and said that Yahoo and Google would not be interested in the company. Other bankers said that Facebook would be interested in Opera as a way to enter emerging markets. Still, others aren’t clear if a deal would end up in an outright sale of Opera or just close partnerships. One source told Reuters that while there is interest in the company, there is no “For Sale” sign on the software firm.. One thing that Operas might not want to lose is its strategic partnerships with companies like Google which it might have to drop in a Facebook acquisition of the company.

Norway’s top bank, DNB, says that a buyer of Opera would have to pay 68.6 crowns, or double Friday’s close, valuing the company at $1.35 billion. There are other things standing in the way of a Facebook-Opera deal. Opera’s founder and top shareholder, Jon S. Von Tetzchner, wants the company to focus on internal growth and says that Opera should reach 500 million users by next year. He says he is not pushing for a takeover. Still, he said he is unaware of a bid but would have to support one if others are in favor of it. One vote in favor of such a deal might come from Opera CEO Lars Boilesen. The executive last October said he would “love to” work with Facebook. Boilesen said, “We are already Facebook’s platform of distribution in emerging markets like Africa and India. A big part of the Opera Mini traffic is from Facebook. So we are already their channel in these markets.”

Continuing its slump, Facebook dropped nearly 10% on Tuesday to $28.84 a share.