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Facebook is redesigning its front page. The News Feed — which is what Facebook's roughly 1 billion users see when they log on to the site — will be rolling out a radical new look over the coming months.

The changes are meant to increase user engagement on the site, make it easier to navigate on mobile phones and provide even more highly targeted advertising.

But any big change also creates a precarious moment in the life of a social network.

Remember Friendster? It was the first social network to achieve large scale success. Founded in 2002 — before Facebook or MySpace — Friendster turned down a $30 million a buyout offer from Google back when that kind of money still turned heads.

At its peak, it had more than 100 million members. Then in 2009 it made some changes to its site, and suddenly Friendster collapsed.

"There was a point where it was really the most important social network," says David Garcia, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

He analyzed data from Friendster collected during its death throws and has come to some interesting conclusions about what makes an enormous online network vulnerable. In Friendster's case, it began with a specific trigger.

"There was a change in the user interface plus there was the alternative of Facebook," Garcia says.

Friendster's redesigned site was awkward to use, unfamiliar, and some dedicated users left. With each new defection, the site became less useful to the people who remained behind.

"If most of your friends have left the community, you will leave it too," Garcia says.

Every time a friend on your network leaves, a network become less valuable to you. Your calculus changes.

Garcia's autopsy here starts with a simple assumption: that when the costs associated with being on a social network begins to outweigh the benefits, you'll leave.

And what's true for Friendster in 2009, Garcia says, is probably still true for Facebook today.

I ask Ian Fisher, who I met at a coffee shop in Palo Alto, Calif., what would cause him to leave a social network, to cancel his account, delete his photos and abandon it?

"About two years ago, I canceled my Facebook account for about a year," Fisher says. "I did that because I was reading so many article about privacy concerns on Facebook, and I was spending so much of my time on there and realizing I was getting essentially nothing out of it that was good for me."

In 2010, changes in Facebook's privacy policies led lots of people to leave the network. Unlike Friendster, it didn't collapse.

It turns out, the vulnerability of a social networks to the kind of mass defection hinges on how people use the network.

If most people use it to keep in touch with just one or two friends, then when one of those friends leaves, you're' more likely to leave, too. But if you have 1,000 connections, the network is more resilient.

And in Ian Fisher's case, a few years after he left Facebook, he decided to come back: "Because there were people that I didn't know how to get a hold of, but there were my sort of peripheral acquaintances that I didn't get a chance to connect with quite as much."I am still trying to decide whether it's worth it or not. I'm not totally convinced that it is."

It is for now — maybe just to share pictures of his new baby.

But researchers say Facebook still needs to be cautious. When you are tweaking a social network, even one as big and successful as Facebook, you don't want to scare off too many people at one time — or you could create a cascading exodus that is difficult to stop.

And that may be why Facebook is rolling out its latest update very, very slowly.

Caught between the gritty political realities of needing cash and being linked to a political leader who has repeatedly denounced money's influence in Washington while raising record sums, former campaign aides to President Obama appeared to side with the money.

That had opened officials now heading Organizing for Action — which was formed from the Obama for America campaign committee to promote the president's second-term agenda — to charges of hypocrisy.

Criticism for their refusal to swear off taking cash from corporations, lobbyists and overseas donors may have had the intended effect: On Thursday, the new OFA announced it wouldn't take such boodle.

But if the former Obama campaign officials running OFA have decided to be the change they wish to see in the world (or at least to look like it), some government watchdog groups aren't buying it.

The Sunlight Foundation's Lisa Rosenberg wrote a blog post titled "OFA — A Dark Money Group by Any Other Name," and called the group "a tiger that can't change its stripes."

She was responding to Jim Messina, Obama's 2012 campaign manager who now runs OFA, who notified those on the organization's blast email list:

"Organizing for Action's mission is to put power back into the hands of the American people. That's why we won't accept a single dollar from corporations, PACs, foreign donors or lobbyists. This is your movement, not theirs."

Rising consumer demand for local foods has changed the job description for ranchers like Doniga Markegard.

Markegard, co-owner of Markegard Family Grass-Fed in San Gregorio, Calif., loves working with cattle, but she's not fond of the hours of phone calls and emails it can take to sell directly to a customer.

"What I want to be doing is the part I love — working with the animals and raising my kids on the ranch," says Markegard. "But I also need to be marketing our product, going to markets and talking with customers. There are a lot of administrative aspects to running a small family ranch, and they are time-consuming."

Now a San Francisco startup is looking to act as the middleman, handling the logistics of gathering and delivering local goods to consumers' doorsteps so small farmers like Markegard don't have to.

Good Eggs began a year ago as a place where local food producers could sell their foods directly to consumers online, says CEO Rob Spiro. But producers needed more.

"We kept hearing the same thing from the producers," Spiro tells The Salt. " 'This is great,' they told us, 'but as I become more successful, I'm becoming a full-time distributor.' "

So Spiro and his business partners decided to step in. "What we need is a last-mile delivery system for our producers," says Spiro.

The problem is that whether you live in San Francisco or Des Moines, Dallas or Wichita, the modern food system is based on economies of scale: To keep food inexpensive and delivered predictably, regardless of the season, you need mass production and the mass movement of goods from large-scale farm to national distributor to superstore.

But similar networks for moving locally produced foods to market are sorely lacking, according to a 2010 report from the USDA's Economic Research Service.

To that end, Good Eggs acquired three trucks and a warehouse and, as of last Thursday, it will now deliver fresh local fruits, vegetables, meats, seafood and prepared foods right to consumers' doors throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. It plans to create a similar food hub in Brooklyn this spring.

The Good Eggs system works like this: Consumers order from a wide variety of locally made, artisanal products online — from baby food to cheese, oranges to muffins. Items are then baked or harvested fresh to order and sent to the Good Eggs' warehouse, where each individual order is put together manually.

The idea is to keep costs down by using an Amazon warehouse model of efficient distribution — except nothing is stored there. The warehouse is used instead for aggregating goods on delivery days. By bringing all the products together in one location and distributing them together, Good Eggs hopes to relieve producers of the logistical headache of direct sales, while earning them higher profit margins than they get from grocery stores.

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China's citizens do not report as much as $2.34 trillion of what they make every year, hiding "gray income" that would represent nearly 20 percent of the country's GDP, Chinese economics scholar Wang Xiaolu says, in a report from the news site Global Voices.

Wang, of Beijing's National Economic Research Institute, told an audience last week (page is in Chinese) that the figure means the gap between rich and poor Chinese is wider than is commonly believed.

Speaking at the Chinese Museum of Finance, Wang renewed an argument he made in an attention-grabbing study of China's income gap in 2010. That work, which relied partly on informal surveying of Chinese wage-earners, drew criticism from the official National Bureau of Statistics. It also sparked a government push to bring "gray income" into the daylight — an effort that met with little success.

China's non-reported income is believed to have many origins, from bribes for corrupt officials and under-the-table deals between merchants to monetary gifts bestowed upon doctors and nurses.

As we recently reported, the pervasive covering-up of revenue made efforts to list China's richest citizens difficult, with the magazine Hurun Report concluding that "valuing the wealth of China's richest is as much an art as it is a science."