Facebook Charging in 2011? Not Now, Not Ever

Rumor had it that Facebook would begin charging its users up to $10 to maintain their spot on the social media network. Thankfully, Mark Zuckerberg will not be reaching his hands into our coin purses any time soon.

After word spread that Facebook may require users to pay, a representative for the company took to its Facebook page to squash speculation.
"A rumor on the internet caught our attention. We have no plans to charge for Facebook. It's free and always will be," read the post. With 460,678 likes, 46,029 comments, and 102,825 shares, it seems as if Facebook dodged a bullet.
However, there is no doubt that Facebook could reap great spoils by charging members.
Currently, the site has 800 million active users with more than 50 percent of active users logging onto Facebook in any given day, according to the site's statistics. Facebook's IPO could be high as $76 a share with an estimated overall value of $33.7 billion, according to The New York Times.

With a charge of $10 per month per user for the supposed "gold membership," that would add up to a whopping $96 billion in annual revenue.
Alas, it could never be that simple. Facebook's revenue is heavily tied to participation. "Once that drops, its revenue is going to decline," said Sam Hamadeh, chief of PrviCo, in a Fox4kc.com article.
This most recent hoax began just days after Facebook's facelift last week. The site now features a Ticker, it groups categories of friends together to allow for more detailed tracking, newly added photographs appear larger, and the "Poke" button is now concealed. A timeline is also slated to be available within the next few weeks.
The rumor spread virally on peoples' news feed, via a message that said Facebook would charge people for access unless they copied and pasted a certain message onto their Wall. "If you copy this on your wall, your icon will turn blue and Facebook will be free for you," the message said. "Please pass this message on, if not your account will be deleted if you do not pay," according to PC Magazine
Many users are reportedly complaining about the site's changes. A monthly charge would probably not go over well either.
With other social networking sites such as Twitter and Tumblr showing exponential growth, Facebook needs to maintain its "free forever" mantra in order to stay afloat.
Twitter announced that it has over 100 million active users worldwide, half of whom log in daily and 40 percent of whom have not tweeted in the last month, according to the Huffington Post. There are said to be 200 million tweets per day.
Rumors about a potential Facebook fee have been circulating since 2009.

Read more  http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/220120/20110927/facebook-charging-in-2011.htm

'Pan Am' premiere review: Lighter than air, but not bubble-headed?

by Ken Tucker

David Caruso needs his trademark sunglasses to look up at the bright sky and glimpse CSI: MIami‘s new Sunday-night competition: the sleek airliners of Pan Am; it’s a new series that is, to use a word that would have been employed during the era in which the show is set, kicky — fun, with the promise of something more.
West Wing director and Pan Am executive producer Thomas Schlamme directed a dreamy vision of what it was like to be a stewardess circa the early 1960s, and his smooth visual storytelling did a lot to cover up clunky dialogue and corny plot twists such as a married passenger boarding a flight containing the gamine stewardess (a pert Karine Vanasse) he’s been having an affair with. Kate (Kelli Garner) is helping out the CIA with a little espionage, even as the Bay of Pigs mess is dragged in to lend some heavy seriousness to a series that really wants to be lighter than air.

The most engaging co-star is Christina Ricci, playing a rebellious stewardess with a working knowledge of Marxism (you can practically see her beatnik black turtleneck beneath her stew uniform; and Ricci’s wide dark eyes suggest evenings spent pounding bongos while reciting protest poetry). In general, Pan Am juggles romance, espionage, and comedy in subplots that will take a while to get sorted out. Right now, the show doesn’t seem to know exactly what it wants to be, and is experimenting with tone, and seeing what works and what doesn’t. That’s the kind of attitude that, if the tinkering is done right, could lead to an interesting series.

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Pan Am — along with The Playboy Club, which has already landed with a resounding flop in the ratings — suggest the deep yet almost inexplicable envy that broadcast networks have of Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men. The period drama has a persistent allure for network programmers, despite the fact it hasn’t really worked for them, ratings-wise, in a long time (pace Swingtown, Homefront, American Dreams), and that if Pan Am were to only get Mad Men-sized ratings for ABC, it’d quickly do a death spiral into cancellation.
The show could certainly do without dialogue that tries to articulate what it wants us to believe about it — that back then, the career of stewardess led  to, as one of the horny pilots says without a trace of believability, “a new breed of woman… they just had an impulse to take flight.” Puh-leese. What Pan Am is selling is fantasy, or an envious reminder of what life used to be like up, up, and away — yes, kids, there really used to be roomy seats and attentive service. (But then again, you were wearing suits and ties or dresses to fly, not sweat pants and t-shirts with Starbucks stains on them.) I’m intrigued enough to watch again to see how the show shakes down, what proportion of romance vs. spy story it will settle upon. Are you?

Read more http://watching-tv.ew.com/2011/09/25/pan-am-christina-ricci/

Diana Nyad Makes Another Attempt to Swim From Cuba to Florida

 

By LEEZEL TANGLAO

Sept. 24, 2011

Diana Nyad is making another attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida after failing to reach her goal in August.
This time, the 62-year-old endurance swimmer from Los Angeles said she's ready for the planned 60 hour journey which she began in Havana Friday night.
"I'm prepared and even saying that though, how many times do you get to do something of this big an adventure? You know, how many times do you get to feel this alive? This awake and alive?" said Nyad.
An asthma attack ended her attempt last month after 29 hours in the water. She was 15 mph off course due to strong currents, according to Tweets on her page at the time.
Nyad is hoping to break her own world record for open-water swimming without a shark cage. A swimmer from Australia finished a swim from Cuba to the Keys in 1997 but used a cage.
If she completes the swim, she would break her 1979 record, where she swam 102.5 miles from the Bahamas to Florida.
"I feel in better shape at 62 than I was at 28, which is the first time I tried this, 28 years old - I'm not as fast as I was then and I'm a little fatter, uh, but that's ok," she said.
Well wishers cheered Nyad on as she began her swim Friday.
"I know I'm going to be cold," Nyad told the Associated Press. "I know I'm going to run into all kinds of jellyfish and the nights are going to be long."
On Nyad's twitter account, her assistants have been updating the public of the swimmer's progress.
At one point, it appeared she was stung by a moon jelly.
"Chief handler Bonnie Stoll said, "Diana was stung along both arms the side of her body and her face," in a message posted on her twitter account.
After changing suits and rehydrating, Nyad continued her journey.
If all goes well, she predicts reaching Florida early Monday morning, the Associated Press reported.

ABC News' Enjoli Francis, Eric Noll, ABC News Radiol and The Associated Press contributed to this story.

 Taken from  http://abcnews.go.com/US/diana-nyad-makes-attempt-swim-cuba-florida/story?id=14596664