Facebook Inc (FB) - Top 5 Stories Of The Week

Here's a quick round-up of all the news on Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) this week:

Tuesday, Aug 21: Facebook co-founder and Mark Zuckerberg's roommate in Harvard, Dustin Moskovitz revealed that he had sold about 450,000 of his shares in Facebook for $9 million at prices ranging between $18.79 and $20.08 a share. He said in a regulatory filing that he had sold the shares in small lots of 150,000 each over Friday, Monday and Tuesday right after more than 270 million locked-in shares of the company became eligible for sale in the market the previous week.

Tuesday, August 22: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approved Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB)’s proposal to acquire Instagram, a mobile photo-sharing app developer, after conducting a thorough investigation to ensure the transaction did not violate any anti-competitive business practices.

The company had initiated a takeover of Instagram in April in a cash and stock deal, valuing the transaction at that time at about a billion dollars.

Wednesday, Aug 22: A Chinese company, Cubic Networks, sued Facebook for copying its Timeline feature that it claimed it had launched way back in 2008. Cubic's Chief Executive Xiong Wanli said that Mark Zuckerberg was present at a Stanford University lecture where he (Wanli) had spoken about the feature for the first time. Facebook had introduced the Timeline feature on its site in 2011.

Wednesday, Aug 22: On Wednesday Facebook released a tweaked version of theSponsored results search feature, allowing marketers to reach out and target users who are looking for specific pages, places and apps. It dies this by incorporating a link in the search results that are thrown up by the typehead that will direct users to their own posts or pages. it is expected to add to revenues since marketers can do user-based advertising.

Thursday, Aug 23: For those complaining about Facebook's sluggish app interface, the social network brought some relief with the launch of an upgraded app for Apple's iOS.

Facebook said that the app, though identical in looks to its predecessor, is tightly welded with the Apple code making for a faster and much smoother start-up. Other changes in the app include inserting the code from Facebook’s individual messenger and camera apps into the main application. This makes uploading photos much faster.