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Facebook debuted a new profile design called Timeline at its f8 conference Thursday in San Francisco. If you don’t love the new look at first sight, you better learn to at least like it: Timeline will soon be the only profile design available to Facebook users. Read More »

Facebook’s new Timeline feature tries to make sense of the things you’ve been sharing to tell the story of your life. To do so, the company turned to someone who became famous for making infographics about the music he likes and the booze he drinks. Read More »

 
 

Facebook has announced partnerships with a host of news publishers that will now allow their content to be viewed within the social networking site. It’s a bold move for the news industry, but Facebook will certainly benefit by keeping users even more within its walls. Read More »

Facebook has partnered with Spotify and more than a dozen other music startups to bring music sharing to its site. Facebook users can now share which songs they’re playing and offer their contacts a chance to join in on the fun in real time. Read More »

Screenshot of Timeline (click to enlarge)

Facebook announced on Thursday a dramatic new user interface for profiles called “Timeline.” In a keynote speech at the company’s f8 conference in San Francisco, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described Timeline as “a great way to discover all the things people have done their whole life.” Read More »

In a matter of hours, Facebook is going to host f8, its annual developer conference. By now we have all heard everything that is coming at the event. Sources say Facebook will make some sort of announcement around NFC technologies at the event as well. Read More »

Is Google evil? Members of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights tried to decide that today in a hearing on Google’s market power. The end result was the Senators requested Google make voluntary changes to its search ranking. Read More »

Facebook has launched a new “personal newspaper”-style news feed, while both Digg and Klout are using their internal ranking systems to try and create topic pages. But will any of these solve the growing problem of information overload, or will they just add to the noise? … Read More »

Thanks to the web and social media, interruptions have become not just a way of life, but a way to work according to data out from Cisco. We’re conducting more work in smaller increments, but why are we still using the billable hour? Read More »

Facebook’s big f8 conference is now less than two days away, and it’s shaping up to be one of the hottest tickets in tech. Facebook has some splashy launches lined up to keep the crowd at the one-day conference happy — here’s what to expect. Read More »

As the battle heats up among social recommendation websites, British newcomer Top10.com thinks it can make an impact. But with Facebook cranking up to launch new features, do independent sites have a fight on their hands? Read More »

Everyone’s favorite social network, Facebook, is getting even more personal, announcing that starting late Tuesday it will begin calibrating how it presents its News Feed feature based on how often a user signs into Facebook. That will more accurately highlight the most important news users missed. Read More »

More Must Reads

The Wall Street Journal has launched a new “social reading” app for Facebook that allows users to share articles from the newspaper with their social graph, and also be chosen as editors for other users. But how will these social attempts mesh with the paper’s paywall? Read More »

Location Labs has built a solid business with its location-finding and texting-while-driving prevention tools. Now, the company is taking its idea of family security one step further by launching a Facebook online monitoring tool, which will now be part of a suite of software safety tools. Read More »

A new study from the University of Maryland’s business school claims that Facebook’s “app economy” has created almost a quarter of a million new jobs and over $15 billion in spinoff benefits for the U.S. economy. But do those estimates really stand up to scrutiny? Read More »

We all know about the consumer Web innovations in the last ten years, created by crunching massive amounts of consumer data for personalization. But how are companies in other industries leveraging the big data that’s erupting from social media services? Read More »

As social media sites become more prevalent and individuals share more and more details of their personal lives online, we need to rethink the bounds of our right to privacy. Not to regulate technology, industries or the authorities, but to protect us from each other. Read More »

Why does Twitter allow users to have pseudonyms, while Google and Facebook require real names? Because Twitter realizes it can provide plenty of value for both users and advertisers without having to know your real name. On the social web, it’s all about reputation and influence. Read More »

Some critics say that Facebook is the new Yahoo: a giant web entity with hundreds of millions of users, but so lacking in creativity that it is reduced to copying Google+ and Twitter, and declining in popularity. But is there any truth to those claims? Read More »

As music services Mog and Rdio take up defensive positions by launching new free-to-listen services, it may look like streaming is the future. But retailers like eMusic are fighting back by arguing that purchasing songs remains as relevant as ever. Read More »

Facebook has added a new feature that allows users to “subscribe” to updates from people they aren’t actually friends with, which brings an asymmetrical aspect to the giant social network. So should Twitter be concerned about this Twitter-fication of Facebook? I don’t think so. Read More »

What drove Walmart to acquire OneRiot and make it part of Walmart Labs is the same thing plenty of other companies — particularly media entities — should be interested in: namely, making sense of all the data that is coming in from users on social networks. Read More »

On Wednesday, Facebook will announce subscriptions, which will let users decide what they want to see more and less of in their news feeds. Subscriptions build on the idea of more control, which follows Tuesday’s Smart Lists, and enhanced privacy features introduced last month. Read More »

Facebook made some pretty huge privacy changes last month. This month the social network is revealing more tools that help users automatically categorize friends, control who views content they post and allow users to decide whose status updates and photos they see the most and least. Read More »

Nielsen’s research shows that the US Internet users spend a disproportionate amount of time on Facebook, a trend that should worry everyone else including Yahoo and Google. I guess, Mark Zuckerberg was right in describing Facebook as a once in 100-years-kind-of-media shift. Read More »

Lots of companies have tried to soften up their image by adopting a friendly tone of voice, but social media has cranked the volume up. But when even banks and faceless corporations are adopting this facile approach, is it time hypercasual was killed off? Read More »

Thinking about September 11 makes me realize how much the media landscape — particularly on the web — was transformed by those events, and how very different the world is now when it comes to how we experience real-time news thanks to social media like Twitter. Read More »

Twitter’s 100 million active users may pale in comparison to Facebook’s half a billion, but then Twitter isn’t really a social network — it’s a real-time information network. In other words, it’s a media entity, and the sooner it starts acting like one the better. Read More »

Design guru Don Norman is the godfather of design in the technology industry, a veteran who has been around the block with companies like Apple and HP. Now he thinks that it’s time we started being more skeptical of Google’s ambitions — or risk losing something … Read More »

Author and social-media critic Malcolm Gladwell has argued that Twitter and Facebook haven’t played any kind of important role in “real world” revolutions like those seen recently in Egypt and Tunisia. But sociologist Zeynep Tufekci makes a strong case for why Gladwell is wrong. Read More »

About two months ago, we exclusively reported that Facebook would launch its music platform at its annual f8 conference. CNBC now reports that it will happen at the much-delayed annual developer hoopla, which is now scheduled to be held Sept. 22 in San Francisco. Read More »

Google chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt admitted in an interview in Edinburgh on the weekend that Google is taking a hard line on the real-name issue with Google+ because it sees the social network as an “identity service” on which it can build other products. Read More »

Skype’s acquisition of GroupMe and Facebook’s Beluga-based Messenger are part of something much bigger than group text messaging: The landscape of personal online communication is changing. In the next generation of social media interaction, users will communicate in ways that mirror their real-life interactions. Read More »

Facebook’s big bid to take on Groupon and other deal sites is coming to an end, at least for now. The company said in a statement to Reuters that it is killing Deals in the coming weeks after four months of testing. Read More »

Proposals to give police the power to shut down social networks in Britain — proposed as a dramatic reaction to the riots that spread across the country this month — appear to have been dumped by the government. A victory for sensible people everywhere, or a … Read More »

Facebook has begun sending out invites for its annual f8 event set for September 22 in San Francisco. Despite its tagline as a developer conference, f8 2011 is not likely to be a snoozy hacker meetup — some splashy announcements are said to be in the … Read More »

If Google wants Google+ to succeed, it needs to get better at communicating clearly with the users of its new community. But the company has consistently failed to do this, and in fact has made things worse. Is being transparent something Google is incapable of? Read More »

Facebook is making changes that are designed to give users more control over how they share information, and to compete with Google+. But will these changes make people less likely to share content on these networks — and how will that affect the social web? Read More »

Facebook is poised to roll out a sweeping new redesign that places a significantly stronger emphasis on user privacy. The new features, which Facebook says have been in development long before the launch of Google+, will start to appear to web app users on Thursday. Read More »

We surveyed 400 of the newest generation, the Millennials, ages 20 through 29, on their attitudes and behavior around at-work technology and tech support, communications preferences and problem-solving styles. Here are the trends IT needs to address to make these workers productive and avoid potential problems. Read More »

Skype has acquired group messaging startup GroupMe for a rumored $85 million. The deal, while a good move on paper, isn’t going to be enough, as Skype itself is going through an identity crisis — whether it wants to be a consumer or an enterprise communications … Read More »

Many of the issues that users of Google+ are likely to be irritated by are the same kinds of problems that Twitter also faces — including the issue of noise in the stream and the discovery problem, neither of which is an easy problem to solve. Read More »

Some newspaper publishers have said that introducing Facebook comments has cut down on offensive commentary and boosted traffic. But it’s worth remembering that Facebook is not the cure for bad behavior, and that handing over comments to the social network means relinquishing control over something important. Read More »

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