Facebook has confirmed it is testing a new feature that allows a member of the network to “subscribe” to another user’s updates, in the same way Twitter allows users to “follow” each other. But implementing a full “follow” feature would be a big risk for Facebook. Read more »
Mobile use of Twitter has climbed by more than 60 percent since April, when the company introduced its official iPhone client, Twitter CEO Ev Williams says. The service also has 145 million registered users, up almost 40 percent from the number it had four months ago. Read more »
The anarchic online community known as 4chan isn’t known for doing things that are cute and heart-warming — it’s mostly known for posting sophomoric humor and graphic sexual imagery. But today, someone decided the Internet should wish 90-year-old WWII veteran William J. Lashua a happy birthday. Read more »
As AOL renews its existing search partnership with Google for five years, and expands the terms of the deal to include mobile advertising and a YouTube distribution agreement, Yahoo announces that it has lost a lucrative search-advertising deal with NHN, South Korea’s largest search engine company. Read more »
BuzzFeed, which tracks online topics that have gone viral, is offering a version of the analytics dashboard that the site uses to monitor the spread of these Internet “memes” to any website, brand or publisher that wants to track the popularity of their online content. Read more »
After extracting a deal from Research In Motion that appears to give state authorities the ability to monitor messages sent over the company’s BlackBerry network, India has said it may go after both Google and Skype in an attempt to get similar kinds of security concessions. Read more »
Freelance work is on the rise, according to a new survey by Elance — a service that helps freelancers connect with employers — and more workers are choosing the life of a freelancer, rather than being forced to work part-time while looking for a “real” job. Read more »
Facebook’s virtual currency is making its way into the real world, in a deal announced today with Target. The retail chain will become the first brick-and-mortar retailer to carry Facebook Credits, which will be available via gift cards at the company’s 1,750 outlets starting Sept. 5. Read more »
Chartbeat, which offers real-time website analytics, has closed a $3-million Series A round of financing from a group of VCs led by Index Ventures. This is the first external financing the startup has taken after being founded by betaworks, the venture group/incubator run by John Borthwick. Read more »
TweetPhoto says it has expanded its features beyond Twitter, to the point where it needs a new name. The company today announced it has changed its name to Plixi, and wants to become a photo-sharing platform for multiple social networks, including Twitter and Facebook. Read more »
After a problem-plagued relaunch at Digg, thousands of users have been registering their displeasure with the new version of the site by voting up links from Digg competitor Reddit. By noon on Monday, nine out of the top 10 links on Digg were submitted from Reddit. Read more »
After months of negotiation and brinksmanship, Google has finally renewed its content-sharing deal with the Associated Press newswire service, according to a brief post on the Google blog and a short statement from the newswire. However, there are few details about the truce between the two. Read more »
The company that publishes the Oxford English Dictionary said it may never appear in print again, thanks to a continuing decline in demand. Does it matter whether there is a printed version of a legendary reference work like the OED, or is online good enough? Read more »
More and more Twitter users seem to be experimenting with Paper.li, a Swiss service that pulls in your Twitter stream and extracts the links, and then displays them in a newspaper-style format. Here are a selection of Paper.li newspapers I’ve come across from my Twitter stream. Read more »
Why is privacy so hard? Sociologist Danah Boyd, who specializes in the way people use online social networks, says in the latest issue of MIT’s Technology Review it’s because “the way privacy is encoded into software doesn’t match the way we handle it in real life.” Read more »
Aydin Senkut, an early employee at Google, was the company’s first product manager, then its first head of international sales. He’s has now been an angel investor for four-and-a-half years and recently closed a fund of about $40 million at Felicis Ventures. Read more »
Etsy, the “eBay for crafts,” has raised a new $20-million round of financing — its fifth — according to several reports, as sales at the user-generated site continue to grow rapidly. The funding round is from a group of venture capital funds led by Index Ventures. Read more »
The new version of Digg, which launched yesterday after more than a year of development, doesn’t seem to be winning many fans. The most popular comments on the site’s relaunch are overwhelmingly negative, and hard-core users have spoken out about their dislike of the new features. Read more »
Groupon says it expects to end the year with as many as 25 million subscribers and $400 million in sales. Chief operating officer Rob Solomon also says the company’s promotional campaign for The Gap was so successful it has been fielding calls from other national advertisers. Read more »
There’s a lot of angst in the book industry about the rise of the e-book, but there is good news for those who care about books regardless of what form they take: a growing body of evidence shows that people with e-readers are reading more books. Read more »
MIT’s Technology Review magazine has released its annual list of the top young innovators under 35, a group that includes sociologist and Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd, Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp, telecom scientist Gabriel Charlet and David Kobia, co-founder of web-based emergency services network Ushahidi. Read more »
The new version of Digg finally launched today, although the site had some teething problems for much of the morning. The redesign of the link-sharing social network, which has been in the works for over a year, focuses on a Twitter-style system of “following” other users. Read more »
Foodspotting, a startup that allows users to share photos of their favorite dishes with friends and other food-lovers, has landed a $750,000 seed round from a series of investors led by Aydin Senkut and Dave McClure’s 500 Startups fund, as well as Google executive Steve Lee. Read more »
Google has made some changes to the features at Orkut, the company’s lackluster social network, that suggest the direction it is going with its overall social efforts and attemps to compete with Facebook. The changes are aimed at allowing users to target updates to specific friends. Read more »
A new site called Digg In The Future — created by 17-year-old high-school student Raj Vir as a research project — says that its algorithm can predict with 63-percent accuracy what shared links are going to make it to the front page of the Digg website. Read more »
Topsy says it now has the most comprehensive index of Twitter content available online, having recently indexed its 5 billionth tweet and its 2.5 billionth link from the network. The company has launched a new architecture that it says can handle up to 100 billion updates. Read more »
As Facebook tries to take the idea of location-based services mainstream with the launch of Places, other services are looking to add value by using location data to make recommendations for users. Two startups who have their eye on this prize are The Hotlist and Hunch. Read more »
Inkling, a startup that launched last week and also closed a Series A round of funding, says that the iPad is the future of the textbook. The company’s software turns the iPad into an interactive textbook with video and even 3-D images that can be rotated. Read more »
Author and marketer Seth Godin, who has written 12 books, said in a weekend blog post that he will no longer publish traditional books but instead will distribute content via his blog and downloadable PDFs, because he says that the book industry has failed to evolve. Read more »
Facebook has again become a lightning rod for online privacy concerns, this time surrounding its launch of its Facebook Places feature. But the reality is that our notions of privacy are being tested in a variety of ways online, and that isn’t going to stop soon. Read more »
This infographic, created by Jesse Thomas of digital creative agency Jess3, shows the relative size of social networks and online services such as Skype, Gmail, MySpace, Twitter and Foursquare, and also shows the proportion of their user base that access the service via a mobile device. Read more »
Facebook’s real focus with the launch of Places isn’t individual users or even Foursquare: instead, it sees the service as a way of making a major push into local businesses and local advertising markets, and the company with the most to lose isn’t Foursquare but Yelp. Read more »
Some analysts are assuming that Facebook’s new location feature will crush Foursquare, the startup that has popularized the location-based service business, because of the sheer size of the giant social network. But Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley says he is confident that his company will ultimately win. Read more »
If you have ever shouted at your PC, slammed your mouse down on a table or swore out loud at a piece of technology, you are not the only one. An online study found that more than half of U.S. adults surveyed admitted to doing so. Read more »
Microchip giant Intel is buying security-software maker McAfee Corp. for $7.7 billion, in what looks like a major bet by the company on the need for enhanced security at the hardware layer, as corporate computing becomes increasingly mobile and continues to move into the cloud. Read more »
Swamped by thousands of unread emails? Constantly digging out from under an onslaught of messages, only to find hundreds more coming in the door? Digg founder Kevin Rose has posted five of his tips on how to deal with the never-ending wave of unread email. Read more »
Secrecy-busting organization WikiLeaks has gotten an offer of help from Sweden’s Pirate Party. The political party will provide server space where WikiLeaks can host files such as the 90,000 U.S. military documents it released recently. The party also hosts files for file-sharing website The Pirate Bay. Read more »
German citizens can now request that photos of their homes or businesses be blurred to prevent them being identified in Google’s Street View photo service, which is about to launch. Meanwhile, Spain says it is investigating Google’s collection of wireless data via its Street View cars. Read more »
Twitter is trying to spread the message that using the social network will have beneficial effects on your life both online and offline. “Twitter Tales,” which launched today, is a collection of stories from users about how the service has helped them or affected their lives Read more »
Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, author of the book “The Long Tail,” has written a provocative piece for the magazine about how the “web is dead.” But while the rise of task-specific apps is a reality, the web is far from dead — it is evolving. Read more »
