Facebook

Facebook is testing a service that will charge users $1 to guarantee that messages they send to people they are not friends with arrive in users' inboxes.

Launched in 2011, the oft-ignored "other" folder is where FB routes messages it deems less relevant. The $1 fee would re-route them to the inbox.

Not quite spam, these include messages from people you most likely don't know, based on FB's reading of your connections. Many users ignore this folder.

Now, users will be able to pay $1 to sent messages to non-friends.

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A slew of recently announced changes to Instagram's terms and conditions have sent celebrities and regular folks alike running for the virtual exits.

Instagram, which was bought by Facebook earlier this year, is under heavy scrutiny for its new usage agreement ... in which users sign over everything.

Basically, big bad corporate parent Facebook is co-opting all Instagram's content ... so many pantsless Rihanna photos will soon be company property.

The user soon must agree, by posting photos on Instagram:

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The National Rifle Association's Facebook page isn't accessible, and its Twitter account is radio silent three days after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Only a Facebook page for the NRA blog remains posted. The last item shared at 6:30 a.m. Friday (before the school shootings) was about the "Friends of NRA" TV show.

On Twitter, Friday was also the last day the NRA tweeted, at 6:36 a.m.: "10 Days of NRA Giveaways — Enter today for a chance to win an auto emergency tool!"

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Ryan Lanza is already grieving and no doubt floored by the deaths of his brother, Adam Lanza, their mother Nancy and the 26 other people Adam killed yesterday.

As if that weren't enough to process, he was erroneously named as the man responsible for the Connecticut shooting by overzealous media outlets at first.

Many TV news outlets and websites were scrambling after reporting Ryan Lanza, 24, was the shooter, even though state and federal officials did not confirm this.

It is now believed that Adam Lanza, 20, had an ID of Ryan's on him, leading to the initial confusion. But for Ryan, it made for an interesting few hours at work.

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Louisiana meteorologist Rhonda Lee defended her short hair after being insulted on Facebook, only to be fired ... and receive a groundswell of support online.

A viewer took Lee, of Shreveport's KTBS, to task October 1 for having short hair, rather than for any job-related issues. Lee, 37, responded in the comments.

Instead of backing her up or deleting the offensive post, however, the network fired Lee, saying she had violated the company's unofficial social media policy.

Now, her fans are furious.

Nearly 1,000 people have signed a petition asking that KTBS rehire Lee, saying she was victimized twice, once by the viewer "and again by KTBS."

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Safe to say November was a relatively good month for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The social network's stock shot up from $21.08 a share on the first day of trading to $28 a share this past Friday, reaching its highest price since July.

Zuckerberg, who owns about 504 million shares of Facebook stock (give or take), saw his net worth increase $3.48 billion as a result. Not bad for 30 days' work.

Long story short, his critics can Zuck on that! Sorry.

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Facebook user Nolan Daniels posted a photo of himself holding what appears to be a winning Powerball ticket from last week, though it appears to be a sham.

The photo, shared at about 10 p.m. Thursday, received more than 450,000 shares in one day:

Nolan captioned his Facebook picture, "Looks like I won't be going to work EVER!!!! Share this photo and I will give a random person 1 million dollars!!"

Nicely played as hoaxes go. The Powerball winning numbers are not in numerical order as a real ticket would be, and the image is poorly doctored, but nicely played.

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In randomly amusing social media news, Facebook recently took down a photo of a woman flashing her elbows in the tub, believing they were breasts at first glance.

The image in question:

How did this happen? In the wake of recent breastfeeding photo controversies, the blog Theories of the Deep Understanding of Things decided to test Facebook.

Terms of Service state that users will not post content that is "hate speech, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence."

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Lindsey Stone, a Massachusetts woman, has been placed on unpaid leave from her job after posting a photo to her Facebook page from the Tomb of the Unknowns.

See it here and see why:

The picture shows Stone, an employee at LIFE (Living Independently Forever) in Hyannis, giving the middle finger and miming a loud yell at the D.C. landmark.

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Mitt Romney was on the wrong end of the 2012 presidential election results.

Now, adding insult to injury, his Facebook numbers are dropping like mad.

A new site, DisappearingRomney (dot) com, tracks the GOP candidate's bleeding of "Likes" on the social media site - which once topped 800 per hour - in real time.

Two graphs, “Recent Like Count For Mitt Romney” and “Real Time Like Count for Mitt Romney,” illustrate Romney's downward trajectory as it happens.

12,041,819 people like Mitt Romney. Wait, 12,041,814 ... 12,041,811 ...

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