Social Networking

Engineers from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have released a bookmarklet called "Don't Be Evil" for the Google Chrome browser. A bookmarklet is a bit of code that runs in a Web browser and temporarily enables added functionality. This one adds more social search results to Google's new Search Plus Y...

Google is incorporating its social network, Google+, in just about every part of its online empire -- including, most recently, its Gmail system. Now, new users who want a Gmail account must also sign up for Google+. It's not necessarily a novel move for Google. The company has been integrating its ...

Facebook Gets App-Happy

Do you like to garden? Share coupons? How about bike riding? If so, there's an app for that -- on Facebook, that is -- or soon will be. As promised at last year's f8 developer conference, Facebook rolled out about 60 new apps to be used on its site this week. They are designed for users to express m...

Facebook eradicated the Koobface virus from its site about nine months ago. However, the social network says it is on a mission to vanquish it completely. It intends to share what it has learned in three years of battling the malware with law enforcement and the larger security community. The langua...

Facebook is enhancing its music listening options by launching Listening With Friends, a feature that will let Facebook friends listen to music together via chat. As the feature rolls out to all of Facebook's 800 million users over the next few weeks, a music note will appear next to a user's name i...

Facebook will be among the Internet services that can be accessed in new car models from Mercedes Benz. Facebook access is just one of the new features in the second generation telematics system, called "Mbrace2," which will begin appearing in new Mercedes models this spring. Introduced at CES 2012 ...

Google has expanded its search engine to include personal results, profiles and Google+ pages related to a given search. The new search capability, called "Search Plus Your World," was announced Tuesday. A search can now turn up relevant Google+ posts and photos from the searcher's friends as well a...

Wendi Deng, wife of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, started out the year by discovering that her name had been hijacked by a spoofer on Twitter. Twitter had apparently verified the account, "Wendi_Deng," as genuine, but after being informed it was a hoax, quickly removed it and apologized to Deng. There...

A group of mathematicians turned to Twitter to gauge global happiness for 2011, and it seems the last 12 months have not been humanity's cheeriest. The team from the University of Vermont gathered 4.6 billion Twitter messages from Twitter's 33 million users from around the world. Starting in Septem...

Facebook has agreed to improve privacy protections in Europe over the next six months, after a three-month audit by Ireland's data protection agency found the social network lacking in some areas. Users will be given more information about how Facebook and third-party app providers handle their info...

Facebook recently began rolling out its Timeline feature, which will replace the social networking site's traditional user profile. Everything ever posted on a user's page will be included in Timeline. Members have seven days to review everything that appears on their Timelines before anyone else ca...

A federal judge has dismissed a criminal case against a man accused of using Twitter to conduct a threatening campaign against a religious leader. William Lawrence Cassidy had been jailed for predicting that violence would befall Alyce Zeoli, a Buddhist religious leader, and for urging her to kill h...

WEB SITE REVIEW

Timeline: Pretty Interface, Ugly Rollout

Facebook will be disrupting the online lives of its members in the coming weeks with the redesign of their profile pages. The redesign, called "Timeline," has been available on a limited basis since it was announced in September, but Thursday the social network announced a system-wide rollout of the...

Facebook's recent acquisition of location-tracker heavyweight Gowalla is an indicator of the potential strategic importance of location-tracking technology in the social network arena. Players in this marketplace include Gowalla, which lets users share favorite places with fellow Facebook and Twitte...

Google+Photos is adding facial recognition technology that will let users be tagged automatically in photos. To pre-empt privacy concerns, Google has made the feature opt-in, said Matt Steiner, engineering lead on the Google+ Photos team. For it to work, the user must turn on the new "Find My Face" ...

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